Melody Williams
by madis hartte
Summary: All it takes is a small push for Melody's entire world to fall apart. Luckily, there's a certain metacrisis duplicate around to give a helping hand. -zeppelin universe-
1. she dreams what he remembers

**A/N: Hello everyone! This is **_Melody Williams_** proper (as opposed to the drabble series). This story has zeppelins, space hamsters, paradoxes, a hand with a mind of its own, a very bad wolf, and the counterpart of a river. Ultimately I blame Zoe Alice Latimer for this; thanks, Zoe.**

** Expect shenanigans to ensue.**

**~madis**

* * *

_"Oh come on, you've seen it on films. Like an alternative to our world, where everything's the same but a little bit different. Like, I don't know, traffic lights are blue."_

_~Mickey Smith, Rise of the Cybermen_

* * *

She was always a very strange little girl. The kids at school all wondered where her head had gone off to. The general consensus was time.

Little did they know that they were right.

Melody Williams was lost in time.

* * *

The Doctor didn't happen always. But he happened often enough for Dad to take her to a psychiatrist. He tried, Dad did, but it was hard, raising a little girl all by yourself. Amelia Pond had been hit by a car when little Melody was all of five years old.

Melody still remembers the car screaming, and those screams chased her into her dreams.

Then one night someone else was there dreaming with her. Dreaming about her mother screaming. With her. And it was a soft, light feather whisper person, just barely there. And Melody, naturally as anything, turned away from the scary noise of pain and towards the other dreamer instead.

Suddenly: of course. Of course. The Doctor. Of course it would be him.

She's never heard of the Doctor before (there _is_ no Doctor in this side of the universe) but it really can't be anybody else but him. She does not question it. Because it is her, viewing through a small window the corners of his life that the someone blue allows her to see. Long scarves. Lost granddaughters. Bowties and French for let's go.

Sticks of celery.

She sees it all in little snippets, like cut up pieces of a ribbon. Not everything, though. No other person should be privy to a man's everything.

In the morning after that first night she tells Dad all about the Doctor. All about their adventures inside of that blue someone. At first Dad humors her, and treats her to her fancies. But when she turns thirteen, and the Doctor persists in her dreams still, Dad takes her to the psychiatrist.

She doesn't want to talk to the psychiatrist. So she doesn't talk to _any_ of the psychiatrists. Dad, however, does, and slowly she sees him get better from the death of Amelia Pond. Enough so that he is able to stop drinking. He is able to go back to nursing, which he loves to do. Enough so that when she is Feste in the school's _Twelfth Night_ he is able to go to that, too, and laugh at all the right parts. It makes her so happy, seeing him there in the crowd. He gave her a bouquet of yellow carnations afterwards, and they went to dinner at the fish and chips shop down the road.

That was the first night she remembers him smiling for a long, long while. It made her unequivocally happy.

* * *

The Judoon stole Dad's hospital when Melody turned nineteen. While he was slowly asphyxiating to death she was daydreaming about the Doctor, and doodling his tenth self onto the corner of a napkin in the university's cafeteria. Some blond snatches the napkin out from under Melody's fingers at the same time she hears the news about the hospital on the telly.

Dad is more important than stolen napkins.

It turns out he gives the last of his oxygen to a girl named Martha Jones. Melody isn't sure if she can ever forgive him.

* * *

The Doctor's dreams are almost too vivid. Too real to be imagined. Splashes of color, and the world always turning, turning inside of his head. Once he says _a thousand thousand voices, all chattering away inside her head . . . it must be like being, well, me_ but little Melody can help him with that, even just a little bit.

All those voices? They almost make her cry. Because they're the sound of a thousand thousand screaming inside of a planet than never always might have existed in the future past present. (gallifrey _falling,_gallifrey **_burning_**_)_

But the Doctor needs her, now, just as Dad had done, so she does not let the burning turn her away. Instead she lies there with him, in the thin place between dreaming. Hello. _Hello._ And it's something, at least, even if he is unaware of her presence inside of his head.

Because the Doctor ensures that he never, ever remembers any of his dreams. He cannot bear to. But she is there, and maybe she helps him, because even after his downfall over the Victory of Time he is still somehow able to become a man who is capable of laughter.

(your fingers bleeding gold and you heart being born infant screaming)

In his dreams that night she cradles the memory in her arms (_i don't want to go. i know, i know)_ and rocks him to sleep.

* * *

A week after the funeral Torchwood comes to collect her. It's a good thing they do; she's become consumed by the dreams and sometimes she forgets to eat.

It's funny, what can happen all because of a doodle. Apparently they all know the Doctor. That's alright with her, because she knows the Doctor too.

* * *

Rose comes back every day smelling of ozone and the blue radiation crackles along her bones. She clutches Melody's doodle in her pocket and goes back again and again.

"I have to find him," she tells Melody. "He needs me."

Melody doesn't argue with her. But she does worry, because dimension hopping is killing Rose, baking her from the inside out until there's nothing left but that hollow sound of blue. Two years later Rose finally hits the right universe.

Two years and six months later she puts the dimension cannon away and refuses to tell Melody why. "Did you find him?" she demands. "Rose, did you find the Doctor? What did he say?"

Rose won't look at her.

"Rose?"

But Rose continues to walk down that corridor, the clacking of her heels echoing the only sound besides Melody screaming back

"_Rose?"_ Rose refuses to look at her. Refuses to even consider her. "Rose—_what did he say?"_

But Rose doesn't answer.

* * *

They don't let you do anything but dream about the Doctor anymore. They absolutely, absolutely refuse, and they hook you up to a monitor to record the Doctor's dreams (because they've always, always been the Doctor's dreams, Melody just happens to be the one dreaming them).

Pete Tyler doesn't visit you, nor does Michael Smith. Or Jacky. Not even baby Tony, who you taught how to say the color blue.

No.

The only one who visits you now is Rose, and all she wants to do is ask questions about the Doctor. What is he doing? Where is he now? How can I find him?

You want to tell her _But you did find him. Didn't you?_ Because the stars had stopped going out.

Hadn't they?

* * *

Melody doesn't tell Rose about the Girl Who Waited.

She doesn't tell her about the Last Centurion.

And she _definitely_ doesn't tell her about River Song.

She's never told _anyone _about River Song. Because if Melody had had a Doctor here in this universe with her, too, she would have been River Song.

And she isn't quite sure how she feels about that.

Sometimes River will kiss her Doctor's brow, and she'll look inward into little Melody, and Melody will look back.

_What are they asking you?_

About the Doctor.

_Don't tell Rose Tyler anything. She'll tear open the universe to get back to him._

But didn't she find him? Didn't she see him?

_. . ._

River?

_Spoilers._

* * *

She doesn't know how long it's been. Just that she hasn't seen the sun in a while. Her hair has gotten much longer than it was. And someone, somewhere, is singing.

It isn't the Doctor, which surprises her, because she's been wrapped up in the Doctor's dreams for so long now she's almost forgotten that there is something else outside.

And for the first time in a long time she turns away from him and towards the singer instead. (Besides at the moment the Doctor is fine, dreaming of Romana. Tonight he is very, very young.)

Almost as young as:

_Goodbye—no, that's not—_

_Who are you?_

_Who? Who is who is who?_

_My name is_

_Pond. Melody. River River River_ and abruptly Melody is seeing an image of her red-haired self wrapped up in golden curls and dark brown skin, like a badly overlaid image. Wrapped up in the image is the overwhelming feeling of _sister sister sister_, and Melody thinks _No, that's River. I'm Melody Williams._

_Williams? Melody Williams? _For the first time there is uncertainty in the other. Melody gets a brief flash of _wrong right universe _and then—

_It came for us._

_What?_

_No. It is coming. Must make things quick for speaking. Mummy told me to tell me will to tell you_

_I don't—_

_Tenses are difficult, I can imagine. Tell me to tell you-Melody-Williams to say that I must tell my John about you. After it comes._

_After what comes?_

_Bad Wolf._ And there is a hiccup, and Melody thinks _I know that title. Rose is that title now._ How had she never noticed it before?

_Because Bad Wolf is clever, not even Rose knows yet, but she suspects who she has been will be. Bad Wolf has made my John very sad. No, sorry, it will make him sad. It is clever, and wants its Doctor, and it will make my John sad. My John is not-yet-your John—but yes, I suppose that doesn't really answer your question._

_Who is Joh—that's not an answer!_

_Mummy tried to explain to me once, but I was too little later on. But now I do understand. I'm pretty sure that we haven't properly met yet. What _was_ that word she told me first to say? And why a yellow jacket?_

_Listen, I'm not sure you understand—_

_Yellow hasn't happened for you yet. Do not worry, Melody Williams, my John will be speaking about to you eventually. What _is_ that word?_

_John . . . will meet me?_ Melody hasn't met anyone new outside-of-Torchwood for a long time.

_Oh, yes, the word is hello. Hello, Melody Williams!_

Then the Doctor turns over in his sleep, and Melody turns back to dreaming.

* * *

Rose comes in again today. Melody is yanked out of her dreaming, put off the drugs that keep her asleep rather early in the day. That's how she knows Rose is coming in. They always make sure that Melody is lucid when Rose comes in.

The change in her old friend startles Melody. (Hollow brown eyes and a broken, jagged grin.)

"Where is Rose?" Melody asks Bad Wolf.

"What was the Doctor doing before I came in?"

Melody closes her eyes, mainly so she won't have to look at that brokenness anymore. "He was very young. Younger than I've ever seen him." _Gallifrey young, Academy young. And he met a fellow Gallifreyan who stole his heart. She was blonde and loved loved loved_

"And?"

_she loved flowers. Small white ones that smelled like time. She wore them in her hair on their wedding day_

"You're not going to tell me?" The tone of voice is incredulous.

_and he still dreams about her sometimes, even a thousand years later when he is an old, old man_

"No," Melody says. "I'm not. Some things not even Rose Tyler is supposed to know."

_it's funny that she was blonde_

The sardonic lift of an eyebrow. "Are you sure about that? Because I _need_ to find the Doctor. This would be all so much simpler if you told me where to find him. Then the—" And then she stops, abruptly, as if someone had pressed pause on the remote.

"Then the what?" Melody asks.

Bad Wolf slams her hands down on the table that separates them. "Tell me where he is."

"No."

* * *

It's the first time she tries resisting.

It's the first time she tries not dreaming. And it's surprisingly easy, because for the first, first time he has someone.

River Song. The other Melody.

What about when you aren't there anymore?

_I don't know. How far do you skip ahead in his dreams?_

. . . never past you.

_So we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. How are you holding up?_

. . .

_Melody. How are you holding up?_

Why does Bad Wolf want to know where the Doctor is?

_Because she thinks that the man she was given isn't him. And she _can't_ come through anymore, the walls of reality—_

—would collapse, yes. But I don't understand. Who was she given? And please don't say spoilers.

_I won't then._

And Melody is not sure why she doesn't tell River Song about the singer who helps her escape from the pain. But she doesn't. It's almost like a secret, all to herself throughout those long hours of saying no.

Because refusal brooks consequences.

* * *

When Bad Wolf brings in a Time Agent called Jack Harkness, Melody's little singer tells her all about John.

It helps Melody deal with the pain.

_My John is wonderful. And even though he doesn't know me yet he will love me just as much as I love him. Melody Williams will love him too. His favorite color is blue, but mine is red, so I'll be red, and Melody Williams's favorite color is yellow. See? I'm learning about everyone._

_Yes. Yes you are. Very good. Very . . ._

_. . . and my John also loves oranges and has green eyes because his body was still changing later . _Then she finally notices the thing that Melody was desperately trying to keep her from noticing.

_Melody Williams . . . is in pain?_

_No, no, I'm—_

_But my sensors indicate that Melody Williams is in pain. _Her voice became frightened. _Much pain._

—_tell me—tell me about John. What's his favorite smell?_

_Freshly cut grass. _But the little one refuses to be derailed. _You _are _in pain. Melody Williams is crying. Why?_

_Please . . . tell me about something . . ._

_Why are they hurting Melody Williams?_

Far away in another world entirely Jack Harkness says, "Now Miss Williams. I've been gentle so far, but if you refuse to cooperate I'm afraid that I will have to get a bit . . . rough with you." He did something that made her body scream, but she wasn't focusing on that, she wasn't, she was—"Tell us where to find the Doctor, Miss Williams."

And the little one goes very, very quiet. _They are hurting you because I refuse to open my doors for them. They are hurting _Melody Williams_, who talks to me. They are **hurting** her._

"N-No," Melody spat.

—_they want me to take them to the other Doctor, and I wouldn't open my doors because that I'm too young, I'm frightened of going between spaces, I'd _disintegrate—

Jack did the same thing again, and Melody can't seem to stop screaming.

—_all inside, and it wouldn't be just me, this whole _world_ would disintegrate—_

"How about now? Do you still say no now?"

At first she had been confused, when they'd brought Jack in, because _Jack Harkness _wouldn't hurt her.

Then she remembered that this wasn't her Jack. This was a Jack Harkness who had never left the Time Agency, a Jack Harkness without the Doctor. And at that moment Melody Williams knew the true inspiration for fear.

"I . . . say no . . ."

_Agony._

And the little singer was frantic. _I couldn't let the world disintegrate—my John would be very unhappy—and he will rescue me next Tuesday, because he'll have finally found me by then—Melody Williams, YOU HANG ON. Two more minutes. We're coming. Well, I _will be _coming._

_. . ._

_Melody Williams? Melody Williams, my John is coming for you, so you just **hang on**, okay? Melody Williams Melody Williams Melody Williams—_

Anything else she might have said was drowned out by Melody Williams screaming.


	2. thought we could use some sunflowers

_I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry, it was two minutes _thirty seconds,_ I'm so so so sorry we're late—_

The sounds of flesh hitting flesh—a grunt of pain.

—_I'm sorry I'm sorry, but my John's here now, he'll take care of you—_

Bad Wolf screeching, "Get in there and _stop him!"_

—_my John is _great_ at taking care of people._

Someone is unstrapping Melody from the examination table, picking her up. Then she is bobbing up and down as they move.

Is he _carrying_ her?

She can't seem to stop crying. Everything _hurts_.

A bang, as he shoves himself through the wooden doors backwards so that the doors don't crash into her legs. They are followed by the _rat-a-tat-tats _of gunfire. He sets her down on something cold. It feels nice against the burning of Melody's skin. "Get us out of here braveheart," he mutters.

The sound of doors being slammed shut, and then a _vworping_ that is as familiar to Melody as herself. The TARDIS (so young, so young) _throws_ herself into the Time Vortex, and she is still chattering away inside of her head—_see, I _told_ you we'd come; my John will _always _come for you, Melody Williams—_as John picks Melody up again.

Her head feels curiously light headed as they begin running again. She can make out white walls, but everything else is blurred by tears.

Around them the TARDIS is literally _whooping_ as she throws herself through the Vortex, everything shuddering as she puts on more and more speed. John sets Melody down onto a bed, and then he is turning away from her, and there is the light clinking of little glass jars being rummaged through and the sound of John _muttering_.

Melody feels wrong all over, and so tired. For some reason the bed she is on is red. She could have sworn it was white when John set her down . . .

* * *

Melody Williams dreams of the Doctor. For some reason he is sad. She tries to lift her arms to comfort him, but she is tired, and everything is absurdly heavy, so she simply lies next to him, dream to dream to dream to—

No.

It's not the Doctor. It's too high energy to be the Doctor, too manic.

Too . . . human.

And the song this mind is singing is a war chant and a hymn, all at once, and it's humming desperate and panic all over. But it's a nice song, and she turns over in it, content to lie in its warm dark forever.

* * *

"_Don't you **dare."**_

Then John is restarting her heart with a hypodermic needle full of adrenaline, and the TARDIS is screaming inside of her head _Melody Williams Melody Williams Melody Williams_, barely pausing for breath.

Melody Williams kneels on the floor and _tries_ to remember how to breathe.

* * *

"Don't try and move too quickly," he says. Melody can barely look at him. He had set her back up onto the cot after her initial adrenaline fueled plummet to the floor, and he's busy wrapping up her hands, now. Melody is grateful for this, because that means she won't have to look at them, either.

Jack had especially delighted in targeting her hands. Such a . . . _sensitive_ area, he'd told her.

Melody shudders and focuses on John's hands instead.

John has such _nice_ hands.

Inside of her head the TARDIS is chortling. _Shut up_, she tells her. If such a thing is possible the mad thing only grins wider, and Melody is reminded just exactly how _young_ she is.

They were going to try and send _her_ ripping through that cold, dark void between dimensions? This _child?_

_Mummy_ _had said that they'd probably try_, the "child" pipes up. _If things diverged one way rather than the other, and they did, and here we are, and ooh you're just going to _love_ your room._

* * *

John is watching Melody. Physically he is putting away the bandages and antiseptics and such-like that passed for muster in the fifty-first century, but really he's watching her and not saying much at all.

Absurdly all Melody wants at that moment is the chance to have had a bath beforehand.

"Can I—?" she asks at the same time John turns around and says "I—" They both stutter to a stop. John looks embarrassed, which is funny, because the Doctor has never, _ever_ looked that embarrassed before.

Just another reminder of exactly how human the Doctor isn't.

* * *

"Before you ask anything of me can I go sleep? It's been awhile since I've slept without drugs."

"Yes, err, okay—"

"Because she liked to look in on him. A lot."

"Alright. You can—you can tell me about it later. You look pretty dead."

"Torture tends to do that to people. And I think I just almost died."

"Right."

". . . John?"

"Hm?"

"Thank you."

"Of course. Although I'm still a bit confused as to what's going on."

"So'm I."

"Right. Err . . . who are you exactly?"

"Melody Williams."

"Oh. You're looking at me as if I'm supposed to know who that is."

"No. I guess not then. Will you help me to my room? I still feel a bit woozy."

"You have a room?"

"Apparently."

* * *

What also becomes apparent to Melody, as she lies there in her bed, is that it has now become impossible for her to sleep without the drugs.

She weeps into her pillow from sheer exhaustion, and after a while the TARDIS is able to sing her to sleep with a song about saucepans.

* * *

Melody wakes up from a nightmare where Dad is being . . . _persuaded_ to give up the coordinates for the Doctor by Jack Harkness. Melody is forced to watch.

She wants to protest: Dad's never even met the Doctor before.

It takes her another shuddering second or two to remember that Dad is also dead.

It also takes her longer than it should for her to realize that this is the first night she hasn't heard even a whisper from the Doctor's dreams.

Not even from River.

She has to wonder what they're doing _right now_, because last she'd heard the Doctor was dead, for lack of a better term to it, and River had been so, so young in jail.

Tomorrow she wonders: will he be having his heart broken as he sees his wife off to the Library? Will he be tootling around the TARDIS on his recorder, with Jamie and Zoe at his heels?

Or will Melody just have another night of nightmares?

She isn't sure which one she'd prefer anymore.

* * *

Because really, when you come right down to it, Melody still loves the Doctor very, very much.

* * *

She just isn't sure if she wants to be in his head anymore.

* * *

_So . . . do you like your room?_

_Yes. I love it._

_Oh good! _And there is such relief in that child's voice. _Because your home is inside of me just as much as my John's home is inside of me. Mummy says that's the way for all of us, though. Even though there are only two now. Technically one per each universe, now that I think about it. What a silly thing language is!_

_Who is your mother? _It helps Melody to have the smaller things to focus on. She is sure that she would be crying, if not for the smaller things, all of those tiny inconsistencies.

The TARDIS grows quiet, and then she says all in a mumble, _I haven't met her yet. I . . . peeked ahead. Just a bit._

She sounds for all the world like a child caught with her hand in the cookie jar, and Melody can't help but laugh.

The TARDIS hastens to add: _But I am trying my best to not peek ahead with Melody Williams except for her favorite color, which you were going to tell me about but you don't have to anymore since I already know it. For my John it's already too late. _She sighs a bit, like a girl in a melodrama. _Mummy said it was rude, looking ahead too much into other people's personal business, but her Doctor and my John are _different. _They need such looking after. They're a bit silly without us, you see. Such children! Oh, and you're welcome, Melody Williams._

At that precise moment the door opens and John sticks his head in. "Ah," he says. "This is . . . not the library,"

"No, it's not."

"This is your room." He looks around appraisingly, eyebrows raised. "It's very yellow."

"Yes."

"I like it."

"So do I."

"Yes, well. All right." He bobs his head up and down, closes the door behind him.

_What was _that? Melody begins to ask, only for John to open the door again, looking even more perplexed than before.

"This is also _not_ the library."

"No, it isn't."

"I thought not." He shuts the door again.

Melody sighs, looks down at her hands. John had said that with whatever acid Harkness had used they would be a long time healing, even with advanced medicines. This would make everything rather difficult, she thinks. She goes to get up from her bed, and makes the mistake of putting the slightest bit of pressure on her hands.

The pain makes her gasp, and she quickly snatches them back to where they wouldn't accidentally touch anything. How was she going to even brush her teeth, let alone change out of her clothes from yesterday? The day before yesterday? Last week?

When _is_ the TARDIS, anyway?

"And here we are! The librar—oh. Hello again Melody."

"Hello." She waves at him.

He holds up a finger. "Hang on a moment. Just want to check something." He slams the door; she can hear him running down the hall.

He opens the door to her room again. "Nope." Slams the door shut again.

More running.

He opens the door to her room again.

"Nope."

Repeat.

"Nope." He makes as if to close the door again.

"I think you've made your point." Because the dear man _can _ramble on so—and then she has to remind herself that while he may _look_ like the Doctor, he is an entirely different man. This universe's version of the Doctor, whom Rose had happened to find and whom she had found lacking . . .

He has the grace to look a bit sheepish. "Right. Ahem. Just wanted to be sure. I've been looking for the library. Have you seen it?"

"No."

"Right then. Since I seem to be incapable of _going anywhere else_ today." He glares up at the ceiling for a moment before stepping into the room, leaving the door open behind him. She watches him amble around the room she herself has not grown accustomed to yet. Watches the way he strokes the white wood furniture, watches the way he makes faces at himself in the vanity mirror.

"It's a bit sparse in here," he comments.

"I think she's giving me the chance to decorate it a bit myself. She's very kind like that." All around Melody the TARDIS hums in appreciation at the compliment.

"Mm." He opens the bathroom door, sticks his head inside. "Listen to the acoustics in here! Did you know that I once helped Beetho—"

"John."

"—ven compose the—oh!" He stops, wheels about to face her. "_I'm_ John."

Melody blinks at him. "Of course?" she says, but it comes out as more of a question.

"They just normally called me Doc."

"Well, if you _prefer _Doc, I could—" she begins, but he interrupts her with a "No, no, John's fine. John's a right good name." He sniffs, rubs at his nose self-consciously. "A right, good, proper name."

"Riiiight. Um." Melody is mortified that she even has to ask. She begins all in a rush, before she can lose her courage. "John, it's just that, um . . . I mean, if you wouldn't mind too terribly—I mean, my hands. I can't use them. They hurt too much. And I need to get changed. And brush my teeth." He stares at her blankly. Oh dear Lord, does she need to spell it out for him?

"I need you to help me get ready. For my day."

"Oh." _Now _he gets it, because he's blushing to the roots of his hair, and he can't seem to look at her. "Right." Then he whirls around, and snags the strip of cloth that certainly _hadn't_ been there a moment before on the dresser top.

He holds it up for her inspection and manages to grin at her. "A blindfold then?"

"A blindfold for you would be nice, yes."


	3. decides to go somewhere new

John was a perfect gentleman about the whole thing, mainly because he was more embarrassed than Melody was. He couldn't stop blushing, and he held the strap of her bra between his thumb and forefinger as though it were on fire.

He hooks the clasps of her bra, his fingers ghosting along her skin, and then jumps away, nearly tripping over his feet in the process.

She turns towards him. He's standing in the center of the room, arms akimbo. He looks completely ridiculous, standing there with that blindfold on, all over a gawky giraffe, and in spite of her embarrassment she can't help but smile at the picture he painted.

John is looking in the general direction of the floor and his bare feet. "John?" she says.

He jumps, as if electrocuted. "Yes?" His voice cracks up an octave, and he clears his throat, hand tugging on the collar of his t-shirt in a nervous tick.

"I was thinking—I was thinking that a dress would be okay, because, um, there's less to—to put on."

"That is—that is the most—ahem." John clears his throat again. "The most logical." He bobs his head up and down, awkward. "Right. I think I saw an opening to the closet this way—" He stumbles his way forward, hands outstretched, and bumps into the bed. "Oof. No, this is," he pats the bed with his hands, "definitely not the closet. This is Melody's bed."

Melody laughs at him, and John turns towards the sound blindly. "Do you know difficult it is," he grumps, "trying to find the bathroom while protecting _your_ dignity and honor?"

"Why the bathroom?" Melody asks.

"There was a doorway leading from the bathroom to the dressing room back thataway, and I would ever so much appreciate it if you would help me _find _said doorway instead of laughing at me, much obliged."

"Sorry," Melody says, still giggling. "You just look like a giraffe."

He straightens and puts his hands on his hips. "I do _not_."

"You do. An overly gawky giraffe. A teenaged giraffe."

"Will you just—will you just help me go get you a dress, _please_?" But despite his irritation he's grinning, too, as if he can't help it, all over his face.

"Okay, okay. Sorry. Look, follow the sound of my voice—careful! Don't bump into the dresser! On your left—oops. Sorry. My left, your right. Sorry."

"Yeah," John mutters. "Sorry." But he's still grinning.

* * *

"So—So, if I take off the blindfold I won't _see_ anything?"

"No, I'm back in my room."

"Right. Good. Hang on then." He hares off down the stairs, barely pausing to take off the blindfold. The wardrobe _here _is drastically smaller than he remembers it last being, but that had been the other TARDIS. The Doctor's TARDIS. There had been centuries and _centuries_ of amassed stuff in there. In _this_ wardrobe there is probably only so much stuff as John's single lifetime could collect. The TARDIS, existing through all of time, likes to do things like that. But, still, there's just enough stuff to get delightfully lost in, which John promptly does until he can cool off his head.

* * *

_Please_, he thinks_, let it _not_ be something with buttons._ He's collapsed on a giant thimble that he'll probably collect sometime in the future, and has his head in his hands and _tries_ not to think about the strange girl he'd left behind.

Because John is still in love with his fiancée.

He's still _mourning_ his fiancée.

But the Doctor always had a certain weakness for gingers.

John shakes his head. "No," he whispers. "I am not the Doctor. If these last five years have taught you anything they should have taught you that."

He hopes if he says it often enough he'll begin to believe it, too.

* * *

But John can't deny that Melody has the most beautiful red hair that he's ever seen.

* * *

When he'd picked out the dress it was red and pulled over the head. When he went to put it on Melody, however, it became apparent that without him looking the TARDIS had transmorgified it into a yellow sundress with buttons down the front.

It frightens him, this reminder of just how young the TARDIS is. How flippant. In the last two days he's walked her up and bottom, slowly, slowly getting used to her. Everything was practical, white walls and plain wooden doors and the kitchen was all _industrial. _But then he'd turn around and find a vase of yellow daffodils sitting on a bright green dresser that certainly _hadn't_ been before. Or he'd turn a corner, only to find all of the doors transformed from plastic wood to stained-glass masterpieces. And she was small, smaller than his old TARDIS.

The Doctor's TARDIS, now. Not John's. He has to remember that.

She is the size of a very large house that happens to have an indoor and an outdoor garden and two tennis courts and a baseball diamond and a giant gaming center, complete with Earth arcade games from the fifties. All of _those_ frivolities he'd found only just this morning, before Melody Williams woke up.

She was _changing_. Changing herself to him. To John. And she's doing it all with this wild _glee_. Sometimes he suspects that she's doing it just to shock him. Why else would there suddenly be a duck pond in the middle of his room?

And everything, everywhere, was bright and shiny and _new_. The newness of it scares him witless. _His_ TARDIS had been ancient, a museum piece, when he'd first come across her all those years ago. She'd had time to settle into a personality, had moved herself around for countless other travelers before him. And she had her quirks, true, fiddling with a room there, adding on an extra corridor when he wasn't looking, taking him from one part of her to another in the blink of an eye by simply switching doorways._ His _TARDIS had known pain, and heartache, and had lived a full, long life.

_This_ TARDIS had fun changing his wallpaper in his room a dozen times a day simply because she _could._

And he's frightened. Frightened that he'll mess her up, like he'd messed Ace up, or Rose or Martha, simply because he was _careless._

It's a frightening thing, becoming a father.

* * *

"Melody? We need to talk."

"Yeah, we do."

He makes them omelets in the kitchen. They sit down on opposite sides of the breakfast table.

Their knees almost touch.

* * *

"John?"

"Yeah?"

"I can't eat my omelet."

He looks at her fork, her bandaged hands, and then his eyes flit up to her face. "Oh. Right." He grabs his chair, moves it all the way around to her side of the table, which wasn't that far of a distance, considering that it was a two-seater to begin with. He goes back around the table for his omelet, sits it down next to Melody's.

He sits down in the chair. He is so close she can see funny gold specks in his eyes.

"Right," John says. "How should we do this?"

"John, just feed me the omelet."

* * *

"Thank you."

"You're welcome."

* * *

It is a good thing John was so focused on feeding her the omelet. Otherwise her blush would have given Melody Williams away.

* * *

To be fair, John waited till both omelets were mostly eaten before he began to interrogate. (Although, to be fair, it wasn't interrogation so much as Questions and Answers.)

* * *

"So," he drawls, pushing both omelets out of the way. He crosses both arms on top of the table, leans on them so he can look Melody straight in the eyes. As an intimidation factor it isn't very successful, but it certainly invades Melody's personal space. "How in the _world_ did someone like _you_ end up in Torchwood Three?"

"You're the metacrisis," she counters, just to be sure. John nods.

"Yep," he says, popping the "p." "That's me. Half Doctor, half Donna Noble." The he frowns. "Wait, hang on—_why _am I telling you this? I hardly know you!" He leans back in his chair, crosses his arms. Melody twists around a bit in her seat so she can face him.

"Sometimes people just know one another."

He raises an eyebrow. "That is a rubbish explanation."

"_You're_ the one who came up with it!"

"Oi! I did not!"

"Yes you did! Well, you will have had. You did, from my point of view. Then you started talking about ice cream, and quite frankly I stopped paying attention after that. Blimey, is this what it's like for the TARDIS? No _wonder_ she talks so out of joint."

"Wait. _What?"_

* * *

"Well," Melody says, "I dream about you." Which really isn't the best way to go about it at all.

His eyebrows shoot up. "You _what?"_ It sounds like he's choking.

Melody frowns at him, because the way he's looking at her—"Not like _that_, stupid. Ever since I was eight I dream what you dream. I can't help it. And it varies, too; sometimes it'll be you in the Academy, other times it'll be _you_ yourself." She gestures to indicate all of him. "Or sometimes even past that. I never know when; the TARDIS is a bit lax on continuity."

John rolls his eyes. "Oh that's just _wizard_. So what you're telling me is that I've had someone rattling around in my head for the last nine hundred years."

"Well it's a bit _longer_ than nine hundred. Have you been going through some mid-life crisis or something, that you feel the need to lie a—"

"That's _not_ the _point._ You're telling me that _my TARDIS_ shows to you—"

"Yes. Well, not your TARDIS. Not this one. The other one. And by the way, why do you have that accent? Your counterpart in the other universe certainly didn't sound Scottish."

John flushes red. "I woke up two days after he abandoned me here and sounded Scottish, okay?"

This derails Melody completely. "He didn't—he didn't abandon you."

"But this is also not the point," John continues, ignoring Melody. "I'm here now and _you've_ been rattling around in my dreams every night! That's called an invasion of privacy, you know."

"Not all of them!" Melody protests. "Just the one's that the TARDIS allows me to see. I've told you. And besides, you're not him anymore. You _were_ him. But then you split off, and now I dream about a floppy haired man wearing a bow tie most of the time. So don't worry, John. _You're_ dreams are perfectly safe."

John is staring at her, eyes a bit wide with shock. He says, "I regenerated?"

And at the moment the TARDIS decides to go somewhere all by her big girl self.

* * *

The floor pitches out from underneath them. Melody is thrown forward; unable to catch herself with her hands, her elbows plow into her half-eaten omelet. John manages to save himself by grabbing onto the edge of the table. His chair scoots away from him, though, and he's left half standing, half crouched.

They have just the time to exchange a startled glance before the TARDIS lurches again, sending both of them flying. Melody shrieks, scrabbles at anything she can reach, the pain in her hand be daft. She ends up grabbing hold of John, pulling him after her.

The floor opens up under their feet, and they're falling down a chute. If Melody hadn't known better she would have _sworn_ it was a slide. The air rushes past her, and it's a silver sound. Then she's being deposited in the control room. John plows into her from behind; his chin juts into the small of her back. With a _ding_ the TARDIS lands.

"Ow," Melody says.

_Sorry, sorry! _The TARDIS exclaims. _I haven't quite gotten my landing down correctly!_

_Dearie, I don't think you've gotten your flying quite right yet either._

John is up and running immediately towards the console. Melody takes her time, adjusting the new-found crick in her neck. It takes her a few moments longer than it should have to get to her feet, since she can't use her hands as leverage.

"Where are we?" she asks. John takes a moment to grin at her from where he's looking over the TARDIS for any damage.

"Don't worry, don't worry! She's as fit as a fiddle," he informs the room at large.

_Of course I am._

"Of course she is. She's a smart girl. And again, where are we?"

He's crooning at the TARDIS. "Don't you ever do that again. You almost gave me a heart attack!"

_I ensured my John and Melody Williams were perfectly safe, so I do not understand this heart attack. My John's heart is not under attack from any physical illness. Does he mean emotionally?_

_It's a, ah, figure of speech. Don't worry about it._

* * *

The console room has the coral supports, the raised glass floor, and the central time rotor from the coral desktop and the console from the Brown-themed desktop that the Fourth had been fond of for a time. The slide they had fallen down apparently was a spiral staircase that rose up into the rest of the ship; it converts back into a staircase once John and Melody are deposited into the console room.

Everything is rough and unfinished, as if the TARDIS had thrown it up last minute before her John and Melody Williams had come down. (Which in fact she had.) Melody vaguely remembers lying on metal grating when she had been in the console room last, but she couldn't be sure.

"You know, dear, I _love_ the coral and the raised floor, but the glass floor—isn't it a bit much?" He's leaning straight out on the floor, peering over the edge at the inner workings of the ship. Of course John wouldn't just think to take the stairs and walk down to look at it himself. "The swing's nice though," he adds. "It's a mite better than being crammed under the rotor in that storage room."

"I happen to like the glass floor," Melody comments.

"Do you really?"

"Mhm." She crouches down next to him, peering through the glass floor to the inner wires and organs of the TARDIS console. "Eleventh you loves to work down here. It's his haven."

"Is it now?"

"Yeah." She pauses. "John?" Her curiosity is burning inside of her.

"Hm?" He rolls a bit on his side to look at her. She raises her eyebrows at him.

"Outside?" And when he just continues to blink at her: "Don't tell me you forgot."

"I . . . have a lot on my mind! I'm only half-human, you know." A slow grin spreads across his face, and Melody can't help but smile back.

Over the years Melody will come to realize that she simply cannot keep a straight face when he grins at her like that, all tongue and teeth and childlike enthusiasm. It's infectious.

Melody ends up laughing at him. "You did forget!"

A smile still curling the edges of his mouth, John stands. "Come on then, Miss. Williams," he says. He helps her stand by grabbing her elbow, linking arms with her once she's standing.

He begins to steer them towards the exit. "John!" Melody exclaims, pulling back. "Wait—we're not wearing any shoes!"

John stops and looks down at their bare feet, side by side on the glass. "Oh. Right. Shoes." He looks up again. "Oh look! Shoes!"

He drags them down the steps leading to the door. Next to the door is a coat/hat stand with a wicker basket wrapping around the stand for the base. Dangling from one of the arms of the coat rack is a dark blue pea coat. It reminds Melody of a starless sky slightly after twilight. Inside of the wicker basket are dozens of pairs of shoes, far much more than the basket should have been able to hold.

_A wicker basket bigger on the inside,_ Melody thinks. _Now I've seen everything._

John chooses a pair of black suede army boots. He finds a pair of socks rolled up in the toe of the left boot. They look a bit daft with his jean/t-shirt ensemble, but more over John was able to somehow pull it off when he shouldn't have. Melody picks out a pair of cream colored Toms. She still finds it funny that there are Toms in both universes. And although John doesn't intend to when he's putting her shoes on for her, he cradles her feet like a precious secret. For a girl her height Melody has small feet, and they disappear into his hands entirely.

* * *

When John puts on the coat he makes an inarticulate noise of pleasure.

"Isn't this _great?" _he squeaks, fingering the collar. With the coat his whole entire outfit suddenly coalesces together to work devastatingly well.

To her annoyance Melody finds that she is blushing, and she covers it up with a laugh. "You're such a girl."

"Oi! I am _not!"_ He buttons two of the lower buttons haphazardly. "It's funny," he muses, mostly to himself. "I'd been worried that the boots wouldn't exactly work with the civilian clothing, but the coat makes it work out alright. And all the TARDIS seems to want to give me now is jeans and t-shirts, y'know, and I'd missed the suits, but I think I sorta like this now even better." He looks up, catches Melody's raised eyebrows and grin. "Shut up."

Her grin only grows wider.

"Shut _up."_ He puts his hands on her upper back and bumps her towards the door. "Well, come on then Miss. Williams. We've got some sight-seeing to do."

"Don't _push me_, Mr.—" Melody stops, realizing she doesn't know John's last name. Does he even _have _a last name?

"Foreman," John supplies for her, and Melody doesn't say anything, but she thinks: _After Susan, the granddaughter who so wanted to be human._

"Well, Mr.—no_, Doctor _Foreman," she says aloud, "don't you know how to open a door for a lady?"

"What lady? All I see here is a right-do firecracker."

She rolls her eyes at him. "Don't be stupid John."

"Don't be rude Mel-o-dee." She sticks out her tongue at him, and he laughs and throws open the TARDIS doors.


	4. this sure awfully looks like a date

"Something's wrong."

"John. Would you quit _fussing?_ It'll be _fine._ It's always fine._"_

"No, you don't _understand. _The thing should have happened by now."

They're sitting on two white wicker chairs with dark red cushions, turned at an angle towards the windows. Nestled between their chairs is a small side table, which holds their drinks and a small selection of food items neither of them have eaten. John has a glass of water (when the waiter had offered him the selection of wines and beers available he had replied that he _never_ drank _anything_ stronger than soda on a mission. That's what he'd called it: a mission. Melody had snorted into her lemonade), but he's not drinking it. He's one nervous fidget of tapping fingers and jiggling legs, and he's constantly turning his head around, checking behind them, around them.

Melody leans over, sips some lemonade with the bendy straw she had been given. The waiter had been quite proud of that bendy straw; apparently they had just come out that year.

Over the straw she raises her eyebrows at him. "The thing?"

"You _know_. The _thing._ The bad-thing-that-always-happens thing. _Don't_ tell me you've missed it in those dreams of yours." It's still a bit of a sore spot.

Melody leans back in her chair. "They're _not_ 'my dreams,' they're yours." When he continues to keep glancing behind them she places a hand barely over his, just enough that her skin isn't touching his. "John, we've only been here ten minutes. We have a whole other hour before the _Hindenburg_ lands. I'm sure _something_ bad will happen by then and you'll be able to save the day like you always do." She listens to the words coming out of her mouth and realizes that they're not exactly the most reassuring words of comfort ever.

The look John shoots her is appalled. "Don't even _joke_ about something like that."

He goes back to craning his head around, and Melody sighs. "Look, why don't you turn your chair around front-ways so that way you don't have to look like a blarmy owl. Or you can look at the view—it's really quite spectacular you—" But he's already turning around, half-mumbling to himself about _spies_ and _women_. Melody goes back to the view.

It really is _quite_ spectacular. They're very high up, and the clouds are white and creamy smooth, like heavy whipping cream, and past them she can make out the blue glints of a lake and dark green swathes of forest. It's like a color palette has been allowed to run around naked in the sky-ground-air, blending together into a watery, glorious mess.

"It's just—it's just my _Hindenburg_ blew up," John says, turning his chair all the way back round to face her again. He squints at her. "And it's been bothering me."

"_Shhhh!"_ Melody glances around to see if anyone had heard him. To her relief everyone's attending to their own lives. "You can't _say_ things like that on a _zeppelin!_ Are you _insane?"_

"Melody, you don't understand." John leans in close and murmurs, "_My Hindenburg_ blew up, crashed to the ground in a blazing fireball. Lots of people _died_."

"Yes, okay, just don't say _blown up._ And look, I'm sorry that happened, really and truly I am, but that was there and this is here, and here the _Hindenburg _didn't get so much as a scratch, and it was retired in the year 1972 after years of service and is now a museum piece. Well, it will be."

John gives her a funny look. Melody can't decide if it's impressed or incredulous. "How do you know so much about zeppelins?"

"I was fascinated with them as a kid. The whole world's dependant on them for transport, especially after they were improved and reconditioned for faster travel in the Nineties; our whole entire world economy's based on them. And . So."

"What was that last bit? I couldn't quite catch it."

Melody's too embarrassed to look at him. "They were the closest things I had to a TARDIS. I used to beg my dad to take me up in them. We always went for Christmas. It was our treat together. And I would pretend that the Doctor was there, too, and that Dad was his best companion ever. I . . . suppose it seems a bit silly to you, especially seeing as you _are_ most ways him. Oh God." She sinks down in her chair, shields her face with a hand. "I just admitted my obsession of my childhood hero _to_ my childhood hero. Someone please shoot me now."

Before John can say anything there's the sound resembling a _bzzrt_, and although Melody has never heard it before she knows exactly what it is, thanks to River. Plasma gun.

"Down!" John launches into her, sending both of them crashing to the floor. Shards of glass and splinters of wood from the chairs rain down on them. Someone screams.

John, blast him, is laughing. "Now _that's_ more like it."

* * *

"Just hold these two buttons here till I get back."

"You have _got_ to be _kidding me."_

"Look, it's either this or running around the hull of the zeppelin with a bunch of Sontarans. Why is it _always_ Sontarans? But, ah, that's not the point."

"John! I swear, sometimes—"

"Melody!"

"Shut up. John, what about my hands? I can barely touch anything."

"Yes, I know. And I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. But Melody, you have to do this. If you don't hold down the first button the timer will begin to count down, and then when it does the acidic compound that our dear Sontaran friend so kindly told us about will begin to burn through the inner layer of the hull, and once it reaches the hydrogen? Kaboom." He even uses his hands to illustrate the idea of "kaboom." "And if you let go of the _second _button the alarm will sound, and we can't have that either. Sontarans. Nasty bunch."

"Okay. Fine. You just hurry back with the sonic screwdriver, alright?" Her hands are already beginning to cramp with pain.

"I'll be as fast as a greased pig. Okay, ugh, that's rubbish; I am never saying that again. Remind me to never say that—"

"Just go! You know, I really hate you sometimes."

"No you don't." Then with a grin and a wink he is gone, clattering down the metal stairs. Melody tries very hard to not cry, and focuses on being brave.

* * *

He bursts through the TARDIS doors, the waiter following behind him, still complaining. The waiter stops dead at the sight of the inside, wide eyed and slack jawed, before he ever reaches the coat rack. "It's—"

"Bigger on the inside, yes alright I know!" John yells behind him as he charges up the glass steps. He slams into the console. "Sonic screwdriver braveheart, please and thank you!" A drawer pops out of the side of the console, revealing about five sonic screwdrivers nestled into wooden slots. "Wah? Five? Seriously, I'm not going to break that many you know." He grabs one, pauses. "Well, I _am_ human now. You never know; I could be really, really clumsy. And again, _not _the point!"

He whirrs the sonic, to test that it's working; that familiar _bzzrt_ is produced, and the end of the sonic lights up a bright yellow. John makes a face. "Hm, yellow. That's new."

Then he's charging back down the TARDIS steps, snagging the waiter by the back of the collar and towing him out of the TARDIS.

John has a Melody Williams to save. And everyone else, too, of course.

Can't forget everyone else.


	5. this is where it gets complicated

"Why didn't I think of it sooner?" John sits up abruptly. The swing sways wildly underneath him, and he has to grab the supports to keep from overbalancing. He had been leaning in the swing so far back as to have his head dangling on the other side, kicking his feet in the air. All the blood had rushed to his face, so it's all red. He grins at her, looking completely barmy.

Melody blinks at him, startled. "What?" She's sitting on the glass stairs that lead down to the inner workings of the TARDIS. She still hasn't fully recovered from the Sontarans (having a gun shoved against your head while pressing down two buttons wasn't exactly the best way to spend ten minutes of your life) and had been enjoying the quiet.

Looking at John now, it's hard to imagine that he is the guy who was solely responsible for the _Hindenburg_ not blowing up.

Truly, it's a miracle.

"It's 'cos I'm thick is why!" He runs his hands through his hair, causing it to scruff up and out wildly. "Thickity thick thick! Of course they might not be there, since this is a completely different universe—but it's worth a shot, eh?" He's already bounding up the stairs to the console before Melody has the chance to stand up. "But of course," he calls back down to her, "there has to be _some_ equivalent of them_somewhere_ throughout time and space. This universe isn't as backwater as all that."

Melody scrambles up the stairs after him. "What in the world are you talking about? You're not making any sense!" _And_, she adds inside her head, _the TARDIS is being curiously silent. What's up brave heart?_

Whatever why the TARDIS wasn't saying.

"Grab hold of something!" John yells to Melody. She wraps an elbow around the railing. John spins around the console, flipping the accelerator, inputting coordinates via the typewriter, and when the console begins sparking a bit kicking the side of it with his foot. With a grin and a "HAH!" in Melody's direction he twists the handbrake and pulls the time throttle. He grabs hold of the railings around the console just as the TARDIS takes off from dead space and hurls herself into the Time Vortex.

"John, where are we _going?" _she yells, loud enough to be heard over the _vworp, vworp _and the rattling of the TARDIS.

"Sister's of the Infinite Schism!"

"Why are we going there?"

Before he can respond the TARDIS lands with a small, satisfied ding. John pats the side of the console. "Well done, you brave girl you. See, wasn't that an _excellent_ landing Melody? Knew she had it in her."

And the TARDIS grumbles, _Though he needn't have kicked me._

* * *

Melody relinquishes her death grip on the railing and ventures further into the center of the console room. _No, dear, he really needn't have kicked you._

_Quite right he needn't have. Although_, and here her voice grows smug, _my John is proud of me. He said my landing was _excellent_, and it quite was, wasn't it?_

_Yes it was._

John is looking at Melody with a funny expression on his face. "What?" she asks him.

"Nothing. Just—no, nothing." He claps his hands. "So! The Sisters of the Infinite Schism. Or, well, where the coordinates for the Sisters were in the other universe. Or maybe they're not sisters—maybe they're brothers! Love brothers, with those awful robes and funny haircuts. Between you me, whoever was their stylist was having a _bad_ day at the office." He tsks. All this time he's been moving around the console towards Melody, and now he's close enough to slightly invade her personal space.

_John,_ Melody thinks, _has no idea of the concept unless it comes to undergarments._

"Ooh!" he adds, grinning at her in that daft way of his. "And maybe they're not infinite at all. Maybe—maybe they're finite. Brothers of the Finite Schism. Schism? Chasm? Split Organization?"

_What are these rubber ducklings he will be talking about soon please? _the TARDIS asks.

_Um . . . you mean the children's toy?_

_How barbaric! Turning ducks into the rubber copies of themselves to be toys for Earth younglings? The poor dears . . ._

_No . . . no, not like that._

". . . and it doesn't really have the same ring to it, a bit like green rubber ducks, horrible mockeries of the real thing in this universe, apparently everyone _but_ this universe knows ducklings are supposed to be yellow, and Miss Williams, you have that face on again."

"What face?"

"Your I'm-not-really-paying-attention-to-John face."

"That has a face?"

"Oh shut-up." He squints at her. Whips out his screwdriver from the back pocket of his jeans, sonics her with a quick once over, and flips open the cache to check the readings. Looks back at her to squint some more.

"Whatever you're thinking John, it's a no. I'm not out to steal the TARDIS, or cause general destruction or mayhem, or imprison you forever inside of a box."

"How do you know what I was thinking?"

"You have that look on your face."

"I have a look?"

"All of you have a suspicious look. That squinty eyed thing is yours."

"Hmph. And where in the world do you think you're going?" Melody pauses at the foot of the entryway stairs.

"Out. We _are_ going out, aren't we?"

"Ah, ah, ah. That's where you're wrong." He bounds past her so that he's between her and the door, hands up in the multi-universal gesture of appeasement. "_I'm_ going out. _You're _staying here. Not until I can get you something for your hands."

This derails Melody completely. "You—you were planning to get something for my hands?" Her hands, which throbbed with pain at every opportunity, even when she wasn't touching something? The burns had been bad, creating starburst patterned wounds across her skin. John had to change the dressing the night before, and the sight of them had made Melody want to weep. She'd always thought that her hands were her best feature, long and slender. Then Jack Harkness had gone and ruined all that.

Melody Williams will never have beautiful hands again.

"I _am_ planning on getting something for you hands. Present tense Melody. And, I mean, I can't _fix_ them, but I can get something so that you can touch things while they heal up on their own. Probably."

"Oh John." And at this moment Melody isn't sure what to do. If it had been the Doctor she would have hugged him in thanks, but John really, really wasn't the Doctor. He was, but he mostly wasn't, and it is that wasn't that has Melody hanging back and mumbling "Thank you." She can't quite seem to look at him, and there's a queer fluttering where her heart is, like it's suddenly made out of goose feathers.

John, blast him, doesn't notice anything wrong at all. "Now you stay here and sit tight and don't go wandering off."

"Well can I go wandering through the TARDIS then?"

John gives her a look.

"It was a joke! Not a particularly good one, granted, but a joke."

"Right then." He whiles around, grabs his coat off the coat rack and shoves his arms into it. He turns back around to her, shrugging his coat into a more comfortable position. "Well, how do I look?"

Melody gives him a quick once over. Different t-shirt from yesterday, possibly the same jeans, definitely the same boots, and the pea coat. Hair in a sticky-uppy mess on top of his head. Some stubble; apparently he hadn't bothered to shave this morning. He looks pretty alright, if you like that sort of thing.

"Daft as usual," Melody informs him.

"Oi! I'll have you know that I am the person whose house you're staying in and whose dreams you've been stealing!"

"For the last time—those aren't your dreams and I don't steal them. Honestly, are you ever going to let that one go?"

"Not bloody likely." He raises an eyebrow at her, hands on hips. "So, did you dream of me last night?"

"John!"

"What? It is still technically me, after all. Technically. Well, for the first nine hundred years or so. Then it's not me. And that reminds me—I _regenerated?"_

Melody squints at him. "I . . . don't think I can tell you that." Melody isn't sure how much of the Doctor's future John can know. She isn't sure how much he can know about her and River, or about Rory Williams or Amelia Pond or any of it. She isn't sure, so she falls back on the age-old, time-and-true River Song method of not giving anything away at all.

"Spoilers."

And now John's _really_ frowning at her. "I know that saying. Someone else used that once."

"Yes, I know she does." _Because she's me. Or I am her. Technically. You and I, John, are more alike than you think._

"You're not going to tell me anything at all, are you?"

"Nope."

"Well, it was a worth a shot. You," he waggles a finger in her face, "stay inside the TARDIS. Do not step foot outside of the TARDIS. Don't even _think_ about _breathing_ outside of the TARDIS."

"Yes _Dad._" He makes a face at her.

"I am not your father."

"No, you're not. My father was a nurse."

"Hm. Was he really. Well, I'm off. Don't wait up for me." Before he can bound out of the TARDIS completely Melody stops him with a "John?"

"Yeah?"

"Thanks."

"Don't be silly." And then he's gone, shutting the door behind him and probably locking it.

Melody gives him an hour, tops.

* * *

It's after two hours that she begins to worry.

* * *

The night previous Melody _did_ dream of the Doctor.

He was crying, and the towers were singing.

She will never tell anyone about this dream.

Not ever.

* * *

In that first hour she finds the art gallery. There were a lot of paintings done by an artist further on in Melody's immediate future. He will be called Vincent, and apparently will be the one to revitalize humanity's interest in art, beauty, and culture.

Melody remembers a different Vincent, and is happy that this one had different ending.

She finds three kitchens. She finds a living room, a gaming centre, a dining room. She finds a karaoke bar, complete with a disco ball and strobe lights. Everything is turned off, though, and the room seems shut in and stale, as if it has never been properly used, or had once been in the future but isn't in use now. There's also, oddly enough, collapsed streamers and confetti strewn all about the place, and an almost empty cup of stale beer in one of those cheap plastic cups sitting on one of the tables. It is as if someone very sad had just had a very lonely party for one.

Melody doesn't stay long in that room at all.

She finds the baseball diamonds and the tennis courts and the lone squash court. She finds the flower garden and the herb garden and the butterfly garden, and spends most of the hour in the library.

All the while the TARDIS chatters away inside Melody Williams' head, making inquiries and asking questions.

_Why does Melody Williams consider her hands her most beautiful feature? I thought it would be her hair._

_Does Melody Williams like chocolate?_

_What is a ZOO?_

Because my mother had red hair, and it always made my father sad.

No.

Where animals are kept for people to look at, and no, it's not quite as barbaric as all that. The animals are really well cared for.

The last thing Melody finds before she notices the time is, oddly enough, a baby's room. The crib is disassembled in the corner, and there's a funny pattern of circus animals on the walls holding balloons, and the walls are a pale blue, the kind you'd find in flowers.

_What is this?_ Melody asks.

And the TARDIS says: _A maybe room. It's a maybe possible._ And then she won't say anything more after that, no matter how much Melody asks nicely with a please.

* * *

_Melody Williams needs to calm down._

_But—but what if he's fallen inside of something horribly nasty? He didn't even bother looking outside before he walked out the door!_

_My John knows better than to do something so stupid as to fall in the hole. He knows to walk around it._

_There really _is_ a hole?_

_I never said that. Did you hear me say that? No you did not. My John is smart, Melody Williams. He'll come back to you._

_It's not me I'm worried about._

The TARDIS doesn't bother to say that Melody Williams is completely missing the point, because she'll understand in 789 days.

* * *

_Open the doors._

_No._

With a wordless shriek of frustration Melody begins to pace back and forth in front of the console again. _It's been four hours!_

_My John told me to keep you stayed put. So you're staying. No wandering off. It's happy to see that my John and Melody Williams became friends all right quick._

_If it wasn't for my stupid hands I would just open the doors myself and go out after him!_

_There are just so many maybes_. _They could have NOT become friends, and then I'd have had to be drama-making. Serious business, drama-making. And no, Melody Williams will not open the door because her hands will hurt her, and I don't want to see her hurt so you won't try and open the door please and thank you._

_Listen braveheart, as much as you want to listen to him, he really is quite stupid and won't know when to stop finding trouble. Or, at least, the Doctor is, but I highly doubt John is any different in this particular case._

_No, he's not, but it won't be happy if you go out now at all ever. So you're not._

And then John fell through the air, and he was fighting Jack Harkness and there really wasn't time for any more talking.

* * *

For a moment Melody can't think of anything to do at all. She stands there frozen, just staring.

Jack has a knife, and John has a hold of Jack's wrist to keep the knife raised in the air and not stabbing him. She makes some sort of choked noise, like a wounded animal, and this gets Jack's attention. He doesn't look around, he doesn't lose his focus off of John, but he knows she's there now.

"Melody, run!" John tells her.

And she does.

* * *

Her heartbeat is a drumming inside her head.

Her breath rasps in through her throat and pools in her lungs before exploding out again, and again, and again.

She's never been more terrified.

Jack Harkness is in the TARDIS. Oh God.

She runs through room after room. They fly by her in a silver world, the wind rushing past her ears. Everything's a blur. Just run. Oh God, just run.

Eventually she finds herself tucked away in a small, dark place, cramped up into a ball. The TARDIS keeps her safe, closeting herself around Melody. Melody puts her fists to her mouth, because she's beginning to hyperventilate.

Presses her fists to her mouth, and never mind the pain. Never mind the starbursts of fire echoing across her skin. Jack Harkness laughing as the acid sizzled.

_"Where's the Doctor?" he asks her. He doesn't even wait for a response. All Melody can do is cry._

_And oddly enough sometimes there's a man there, and they force him to watch her screaming. She thinks they want him to give them something too, but he doesn't, so she doesn't. Then one day the man doesn't come back, and all there is was Jack and the pain._

Melody reminds herself to breathe. To breathe, and to not panic.

But the Doctor isn't here. He isn't—he isn't here.

All she has is John.

John.

Who cares for her hands.

John. And not the Doctor. She remembers John, newly fledged from DoctorDonna. The look on his face, as he did the necessary thing. He would bend time itself to do what is right. Being courageous, being the hero—it doesn't mean doing the easy thing.

It means doing what is right, even if that's terrible, so that no one else will have to.

_John_, she whispers inside her head inside the dark, _be safe._


	6. jack without the doctor is

_Three Hours Ago_

"Oh, this is wizard! I just have to go to these coordinates here, and then off to the Brothers!" John jabs at the map of the nearest galaxy enthusiastically with his forefinger. Jerry had brought it for him to look through, once the man had found out that John is looking for the best hospital in the universe. Jerry is the gardener. "See, right here. How about that? Just five clicks to the right. Merely a hop for the TARDIS. Although," he squints up at the sky thoughtfully, "it's a bit odd that the planet Nan and New, New Earth were switched around to each other's places. Who'd have thought? Good old Nan—planet of the retirees. And _why_ in _Rassilion_ am I telling you this? Ooh: Rassilion? That's rubbish, I'm never saying that again. Just simply doesn't have the right ring to it."

Jerry shrugs at him. "I'm not quite sure, your worship, but I'm sure awfully glad that you were able to fix the problem, because if you don't pardon my language, your worship, it would have been a bugger of a problem if your worship hadn't come along when you did."

John squints Jerry. "Riiight. Well. All they needed was a simple talking to, easy-peasy. They shouldn't be bothering your master's gardens again. Lawn gnomes . . . yeah . . . just a small talking too. Well, my version of lawn gnomes, your version of your common variety aphids. Well, not really lawn gnomes at all. Well, but they have the hats, so . . . " He rocks back on his heels, hands shoved deep into his pockets. "I have to say though," he adds, "I don't believe I said it before, but this really, really is a lovely garden."

He nods, looking around at the garden in question. Everything was still and serene, and there was the soft tinkle of water somewhere and a _tock, _wait for it, _tock_, at varying intervals. But John frowns, because there was something odd about this garden . . . John and Jerry had been walking back towards the TARDIS, but now John stops. The TARDIS had parked herself in the middle of the topiary maze, and John had spent the better part of thirty minutes of the last hour trying to find his way out of the blasted thing. And then came the lawn gnomes.

"Hang on!" John exclaims. He flaps his way over to the nearest plant and sniffs its blooms. "Hm. A woody perennial of the genus _Rosa_, within the family Rosacae. Or your common garden variety rosebush, depending on whose asked. How _do_ I know that? Aand not important—I know what's been bugging me! I love it when that happens. All these roses—" He snags one of the petals off the nearest bloom and stuffs it in his mouth. He spits it out almost immediately. "Ach. Yep, yep, definitely Old Earth. It's original, too, not reproduced from a factory. This rosebush is actually, truly from Old Earth." He goes to whip out his geek-chic glasses (heaven forbid that anyone ever finds out he calls them that), only to realize that he doesn't have them anymore. The Doctor does.

That seems to be happening a lot lately, remembering last minute.

John settles for stuffing another petal from one of the other rosebushes in his mouth. He wheels around to face Jerry, frowning. "Why are these all Old Earth roses?" he asks around a mouthful of rose petal. "That was destroyed a good thousand years ago, if my timing for this universe is correct. Which it normally is, half the time. A quarter of the time. Mostly."

Jerry face is crumpled in on itself like an overly used balloon. "I'm sorry, your worship, but the Master told me to bring you in if any one of us ever found someone looking like your worships description. You or a girl. Either or."

"The Mast—" But John is interrupted by Jerry whipping out a blaster from the gardening pouch hanging from his waist. "Okay, okay Jerry. Now there's no need to—"

"Sonic screwdriver on the ground here, my dear John. Otherwise Jerry here would have to shoot you, and that would create quite a mess. He might not look it, but our Jerry is an _excellent_ marksman. I only hire the best." John stiffens.

"You."

"Yes, me. Sonic screwdriver on the ground." John fishes around in his pockets, grabs the sonic, sets it on the ground. His gaze never leaves that of the blaster's.

"Very good." A figure in a long trench coat steps around into John's peripheral vision. It bends down, picks up the screwdriver, straightens.

"Hello John."

"Hello Captain."

Jack Harkness smiles at John, and it is not a nice smile. "I haven't used that since I needed an alias while doing some investigative work in World War Two. I _do_ wonder why you keep on calling me Jack Harkness."

"You're right. So do I."

It isn't Jack, not really. This man is cold ice all over. You can see the cracked fissures of it in his eyes, spiraling down into the dark depths of the lake below.

Completely cracked.

This man is older than John's Jack, too. Lines fanning out from his eyes, curling down from the corners of his mouth. A bit of white at the temples.

Still has the American accent, though. Still is as good looking as ever. And somehow, for some reason, he still even has his World War Two trench coat.

Just completely, completely cracked.

"It's been a while since we've last seen one another." Jack says.

"Hm. Is it?" John makes a face of what he likes to think is inquisitive inquiry, sticking his hands into his pockets. You always stay calm around something trying to kill you, keeps them from smelling your fear and murdering you for it. "It's only been two days for me. I punched you in the face, and I have to admit, I definitely wouldn't mind doing it again."

"If you're this early in your timeline I can't kill you then. It's a shame; I had been so dearly looking forward to that."

"Yes, I'm sure you were."

"I can't kill you, but I can hurt you. So that's something to look forward to at least." And the rose petal inside John's mouth finally dissolves and tastes like dirt.

* * *

After sending away Jerry, Jack escorts John into his home himself. Jack's home is opulent, huge to the point of obscene. But everything inside of it has a use, and everything has a right a proper place inside of it, and that is what is dangerous about Jack.

His mind has filing cabinets. And if a certain file doesn't fit in the space of his filing cabinets it is destroyed.

John has a feeling he's one of those files that aren't even inside of the bureaucratic jurisdiction of Jack's mind.

A prime target for removal.

John has to keep reminding himself that Jack can't kill him now, because John is too early in his own time stream.

John also has to keep reminding himself to stop thinking the words, _Time can be rewritten._

It's only bad for the health.

* * *

"Now tell me, my dear John: you _must_ have just rescued Miss. Williams by now," Jack says. He pours some brandy from the decanter into a crystal shot glass. They're in Jack's study, which is one of the atypical men's studies that you'd find in old movies: leather walls and red carpeting and heavy wood furniture. "Do you . . . ?" Jack raises his eyebrows and the decanter in John's direction.

"No, no. I'm good." John raises his handcuffed hands in the universal gesture of _No, thank you_. "I don't drink. Gets the brain all fuzzy."

"Suit yourself." Jack throws himself down into his leather armchair. John is left standing. Nor is he fooled by Jack's show of nonchalance. In the last minute John has been able to make out three ways the ex-Time Agent can kill him by the room alone. For example: a hidden spring in the armrests of chair activates a poison to be diluted into the room, a poison that Jack is no doubt immune to.

Jack swirls the amber liquid inside of his shot glass as he says, "So, how is the dear girl? Dear Miss. Melody Williams. It's been far too long since we've last . . . visited one another, and I've been so worried about her health."

John's hands clench into fists. All he says is, "I left her somewhere safe. The last place you'd ever think to look." _Right in the middle of your garden, oh dear God._ "I doubt you'll be seeing her any time soon."

"Oh, I'm sure I'll be able to get it out of you somehow."

_Yeah_, John thinks_, by checking your security cameras._ Jack _has_ to know that the TARDIS is parked in the middle of his garden. Jack is many things, but stupid isn't one of them.

What game is he playing at?

"You probably will," John admits. "You're good at that sort of thing, aren't you? Torturing the innocents. Killing the unworthy."

"Nobody is innocent. Out of all people, John, I thought you would have recognized that by now."

He _hates_ the way Jack says his name. It's almost makes John want to change it, because every single time it's inside of Jack's mouth it becomes an expletive of the worst kind. Inside of Jack's mouth it becomes a sort of a crooning word, the kind of word that has you cringing in your seat and looking away.

Jack continues, "Since you're so _smart_ and all. A certifiable _genius, _that's you_._"

"You're not stupid yourself. Jack, you and I are men of action. Lies do not become us. What do you want? Well, other than to torture me within an inch of my life."

Jack sets down the shot glass on the side table next to him. He stands and walks over to John, who holds his ground. He stares Jack straight in the eyes, expression heavy lidded and implacable, daring Jack to do his worst. Internally he is shaking, but John's always been a _great_ liar.

"I could," Jack agrees. He adjusts the collar on John's pea coat, smoothing it out over John's shoulders. John shudders. "I could hurt you . . . physically." Jack's hands slide up to cradle John's jaw. "Emotionally. Emotionally is always the most fun. Or I could torture you psychologically. Make you a gibbering mess, or an insane psychopath like me, and loose you upon the world. Would you like that John? Would you like to become me?"

"I'd rather die."

Jack smiles, and it's not nice at all. "Oh, you've always been . . . _noble_, haven't you? That's why I like you." He pats John's cheek and steps away. "But not to worry. I won't do those things to you yet. I am going to hurt you in a much worse way, and you won't have any choice but to listen and watch."

"And how do you propose to do that?"

"I'm going to show you your future, and let me tell you from personal experience: it's one helluva ride."

* * *

When he starts remembering again he's strapped to a chair, and he's staring at a movie screen that had come down from the ceiling. He's nauseated, like he's eaten too many sweet things in a short amount of time, and his wrists are chafed and raw around the restraints, as if he's tried to force his way out.

"Post-hypnotic suggestion," Jack says. "They really are such _delightful_ creatures." He comes around to stand in John's field of vision. John squints at him: when had Jack started to wear an eye patch?

"Do you remember?"

"Remember what?" John croaks. "There's nothing to remember. You didn't show me anything!"

"Oh try, dearest, try for me. Try _really _hard."

"I don't remember anything."

Jack slams his hand into the headboard of the chair, right next to John's head. _"Don't lie to me_," he snarls. John's chair tilts back from Jack's blow, and it is only because Jack is still holding onto the headboard that John doesn't tip over entirely. "Don't you _dare_ lie to me! I _know _you remember." Suddenly he becomes calm, so calm, too calm, and it's like flipping a switch.

Completely, completely cracked.

"Tell me your future John. We're all _dying_ to hear it."

John closes his eyes. "Melody is going to die."

"Yes," Jack says. "She is."

* * *

For John it's like trying to remember his mother. So long ago, and he's a completely different man now, almost a dozen times over.

A blurred face, and long fingered hands, dry and cool as she brushes back the curls at the nape of his neck. So, so more human than any of the other Loom Mothers and Fathers; she'd actually chosen to give_live-birth,_ which was practically barbarism. (She was the one who had actually travelled anywhere, on carefully sanctioned outings by the Consul. Never say that his mother was a rule-breaker, except when it came to love.) So the kids at school teased him, calling him half-Gallifreyan, half-_human, _which was the dirtiest swear word they knew. And for a time he ran to his mother and cried.

_(Her dark, dark eyes such a blur in her pale face. It had come as such a shock, that first time she'd been preserved under a carefully-sanctioned regeneration, because his mother didn't have blue eyes. They'd had to get used to one another again.)_

Remembering Melody William's death is like remembering his mother. A thorn pressing hot and quick amongst all the sweet things, too fast to be reckoned with, too sharp to be dealt with. And he doesn't remember much at all about his mother.

He doesn't remember much at all about Melody William's death.

Just the facts: Melody Williams is going to die, that he had seen her die on video, that he couldn't actually remember watching the video. Just that he had, just that she had died, and the image of her, flopping like a dying fish, as she tried to breathe against the thick sludge of the air, and not getting enough oxygen at all.

Just the fact that Melody is going to die.

Just the fact that he had a mother.

_(Death being the operative word in both those cases.)_

* * *

"Oh, look at that. I think you hate me a little now." Jack's mouth curls up in amusement. "How interesting."

John doesn't say anything at all, just stares straight ahead. He doesn't look at Jack, even though the man's right in his face. John is locked somewhere far away in his mind, someplace where he'll be safe inside his own head.

Jack's breath smells like whiskey and cloves.

"I _am_ going to have fun with you," Jack says. "I can tell. And then I'll let you go, and you will hate me. I'm not going to lie; I'm looking forward to that. It made things between us just so much more . . . exciting. You hated me _so much_. The fury of a Time Lord mutt." He leans in even closer to whisper in John's ear: "You wanted me dead, but you could never kill me. And now I know why: because we had to meet, now like this, when you're young and naïve and innocent and I'm an old man, living in the lap of luxury. God. The irony of it all. Doesn't it just make you sick."

Jack pulls back, walks over to the decanter half full whiskey and pours himself another drink. "You know," he adds thickly, raising the glass to John, "that's what I like about irony. It always hits you in hindsight. I won. And you can't do a thing about that."

John remains silent.

"God, I love it when you do that. That strong, manly taciturn thing you have. I'm not gonna lie, it's pretty hot." When that doesn't get a rise out of John, Jack tries a different tact. "You know, John darling, I think I have something you might like. They have security cameras in Torchwood, you know. Well, of course you know; that's what made it so hard for you to escape the first time. And of course I _just_showed you the video where she's dying. You couldn't have forgotten that."

Then there's a long moment that John finds he has no memory for; he's only aware of time having passed at all because of the Time-Lord side of his brain.

John is on the floor. He's still strapped to the chair, so it's mostly on top of him; most of his face is smushed into the carpet. His ribs ache, a ripping, tearing, aching burning that flares up every time he breathes in and out, so that's basically John, in pain, all the time.

Fun.

Had Jack _kicked_ him?

Squinting, John is able to make out Jack sulking in the armchair opposite, nursing his glass of whiskey. "They said I was starting to monologue," he grumbles. "They want me to get on with it already."

"Did anyone ever tell you that you look dumb with an eye patch?" John wheezes. "Seriously, Jack, eye patches are only cool on pirates."

Jack smiles at him again; John wishes he would stop doing it, because it's seriously creeping him out. "See, now _that's_ what I love about you, Johnny boy. You're just so . . . hm, what's the word for it? Oh yes, that's right: sexy."

John swears at him.

"My, such language. Whatever would your mother say? But that's right; I read up on the files Rosie had about you. You killed your mother. You killed everyone. And John, this is the honest to God truth. I admire you for that. I really do. I just wanted you to know that."

* * *

That's when Melody appears in a boom of thunder and sparking electricity to smack John clean out of his chair with a cricket bat.


	7. you complain over the rescue

The cricket bat mostly hits the armchair, since John was already on the floor anyways, armchair on top of him. She still manages to catch him in the shoulder, though, which hurts something awful.

Melody makes an inarticulate noise of protest, whirls around, and hits Jack, who she had probably been aiming for in the first place. The cricket bat connects with his head with a good, solid _thwack_. He slides to the floor, not exactly unconscious, but certainly stunned.

Then there's another shift of forgetfulness, and then John is upright again, and Melody is trying to sonic him free of the restraints.

"Oi! What was _that?"_ he yells at her, although with the pain in his ribs it comes out more as a croak. "Seriously, worst rescue ever."

"Shut up. That was your fault, you know. You told me to come in swinging, and I did." The restraint holding one of his arms clicks free, and he grabs the sonic from her and starts undoing the rest of his restraints himself. By the last one comes free of its moorings Jack's starting to stir.

Tucking the cricket bat under her arm, Melody grabs John's hand. They start running.

* * *

John sonics the door closed and fries the security cameras. They're in some sort of closeted bar, and like the house it's heavy and dark, with wood paneling and heavy furniture. The only light things in the room are the bottles of various types of alcohol lined up on shelves behind the bar, and a dominantly cream colored poster, framed hanging on the wall opposite the door. The woman dancing on it is painted onto the poster in red lines and blue lines, like veins drawn open into the air.

John turns away from the violent sensuality of the room to look at Melody. She's leaning against the wall next to the door, head titled back to rest against the wood paneling, eyes closed. The cricket bat is leaning beside her, propped up against the wall. Her face is sharp and pale amongst the red of her hair, which is falling out of its braid. Her freckles stand out in sharp relief. On her left wrist is a vortex manipulator, and there are three black slashes on her forearm above the manipulator, two of which are crossed out. Dangling from a string around her neck is a black permanent marker, uncapped.

"Melody," John says. She opens her eyes, looks at him. There are dark circles under her eyes. He forces himself to ignore how tired she so very obviously is. This isn't his Melody. His Melody is back on the TARDIS, safe. Well, relatively safe, as safe as you can be in the middle of a psychopath's garden. This Melody is from the future, and if he is to keep her safe now he must ignore how tired she is later. "Tell me what's going on."

Her mouth twists. He can't know it, but the word costs her much. "Spoilers."

"Don't you **dare** give me that." In two long strides he covers the distance between them, grabs her by the wrist with the manipulator. He twists her arm up, baring the lines on her skin. He'll think how in the world Melody knows about _that _word, the one that _she_ used, later. "What are these marks? Why do you have a vortex manipulator?"

She tugs her arm free of his grasp with a vicious yank. "You told me not to tell you."

He swears, turns away. He runs his hands through his hair, ignoring the ache in his ribs as he lifts his arms.

"I'm sorry John," she says. At that he swings around and slams the side of his fist into the wall above her head. Melody flinches.

"_Tell me **something**_," he shouts. "Melody, don't _do_ this to me. Please. Not you."

"Don't yell at me," she says, small and quiet. There's a pause, in which she stares up at him and him down at her. She says, "I can tell you that there are these . . . creatures. We're not really sure what to call them. And you forget them as soon as you turn away from them. They're not—they're not nice. They've done things."

"What kinds of things?"

"I can't tell you that." She shows him the marks on her forearm. "These longer, perpendicular slashes are for the one's we've seen, so that we can know how many there are."

"And the smaller slashes running through them?" He reaches out to trace them, his fingers ghosting over her skin.

"For whether they've been taken care of or not."

"Taken care of?" His hand slides cool from her arm.

She looks him right in the eyes, answers the question he is really asking. "Yes."

_"Melody—"_

"No, John. You don't know what they've done. What they will do to you personally, in your future, so don't you _dare_ judge me."

"Murder is _never_ an option."

"It is when you have no other option! Jeez, John, if you don't trust me by this point at least trust yourse—" The manipulator beeps. Melody's eyes widen. She yanks the permanent marker from around her neck and shoves it into his hand just before she disappears

John leaps back. He looks down at the marker in his hand, then back at where Melody had been. "Well isn't _this_ wizard."

* * *

John runs. He doesn't remember why. He's in the middle of room filled with weapons. He stops running, confused. He's clutching the permanent marker in his right hand too tightly, he isn't sure where the cricket bat has gone off to, and there's a black score on his arm, right at the crease between the hand and the wrist.

One, running across his skin like a death knell at early morning.

His breath hitches in his throat, and on instinct he turns around, isn't sure why.

He's on the other side of the room, grabbing a knife down from the wall amongst a dozen other knives. His heart is thrumming in his throat, a rapid tattoo drum-beat of excitement, adrenaline, and fear. In that cool, dim place in his mind where the Time Lord side of him takes the time to notice such things, he marks that the knife is of Tankthum origin, a people who tamed the lightning storms on their home planet. Anything they made would act as a conductor to electricity, trapping the lightning without harming the user.

_Electricity_, he thinks, and whirls, knife in hand.

He's turning, running, slashing, leaping away as an arch of electricity cracks past his head. And it's hard, because in that split second between remembering and forgetting he has to remember to remember. But he's just human enough to have the gut instinct of _danger_ slicing through his bones.

He turns, and he turns again, he's standing in the middle of the room and the permanent marker is on the ground by his foot. He picks it up, turns around. He looks at the body and makes a hyphen through the death knell on his skin.

The knife trembles in his hand, and there's blood on the blade, black and thin.

_Necessary, necessary, _he thinks, and turns around to forget.

If only everything was that easy.

* * *

"There you are." John looks up to find Jack lounging against one of the doors leading into the room, smirking, with his arms crossed. John is leaning against the table in the middle of the room, bent over double, gasping for air. The knife is on the ground in front of him. It's a different room. He's not sure how he ended up here, or even where he is. He feels sick.

"I've been looking everywhere for you," Jack continues. "Of course, it's not that hard. Just follow the trail of bodies."

"I don't know what you're talking about." But John looks down at the knife covered in thin, black blood and feels even sicker than before.

"Of course you wouldn't," Jack says, amused. His gaze shifts to something just behind John. "Get him."

Then he is forgetting, remembering, and forgetting, forgetting, forgetting as he turns his head, as he struggles, as their hands dig into his arms. "No!" he shouts, but he can't break free, he can't, he ca—

And for the second time that day Melody Williams breaks through space and matter and time. Her momentum from the vortex plows her into John, ripping him free. He has just enough time to see the startled expression on Jack's face before Melody presses a button on her manipulator and then they're plunging through the vortex—

* * *

Traveling through the vortex without any proper casing around you, such as a TARDIS, is similar to getting pulled through a taffy puller with your eyes squeezed shut. Except it's not really similar to a taffy puller at all, that's a rubbish explanation, forget the taffy puller.

* * *

_Four Thousand Year Later_

—and then they're collapsing onto the ground. By the familiar pitch of the time rotor he recognizes the fact that they're in the TARDIS, but he doesn't bother doing much beyond recognizing the fact of where they are. He just lies there, concentrating on breathing.

"Three times in one day is far too many," Melody mutters into his sternum. He cracks an eye open to look at her; she is on top of him, and her hair spills into his field of vision. _Melody Williams_, he thinks as she picks herself off of him, _has such _nice_ hair. _He's still feeling a bit ill, though, so might as well close his eyes again and concentrate on breathing, because when his eyes are open his whole field of vision swims in and out of focus like a bad video reel. Yes, much better to concentrate on breathing, and not swimming.

"Melody!" a voice exclaims somewhere off to the left, and its familiar when it shouldn't be. John sits up so fast that he has to slump back against the railing to stop the world from lurching.

He'd _always_ know that voice, anywhere.

Always, even when he shouldn't.

There's the sound of feet clattering down glass steps, and Melody, next to him, is cupping his face between her cool hands. Such _nice _hands. "John? They didn't hurt you?"

John opens his eyes at the undisguised panic in her voice. Two faces slosh into view, both peering into his face with undisguised worry. He focuses on Melody, says "Just a little," and then closes his eyes again, because it's really too much effort to keep them open.

Ah. There we go. That old familiar _bzzrt_ of the sonic. A bit higher pitched than John's own, but still just as dear.

"He's alright," the voice says, "he'll be fine. Well, as fine as he ever is. But he seems to be suffering from post-hypnotic suggestion sickness—"

"'Post-hypnotic suggestion sickness?'" she parrots, voice arch.

"I didn't want to say from forgetfulness. He's suffering from too much forgetfulness. About two hours of it, in fact. Melody, tell me, what exactly would make him forget?"

"Ah . . . spoilers?"

"Would you quit _saying_ that?"

"Sorry."

"No you're not." The voice sighs. "Look, I have an essence of ginger root distilled down into a pill form in the second shelf on the left in the third medicine cabinet in the sick bay. Would you . . . ?"

"You're just trying to get rid of me."

"Right in one."

John opens his eyes in panic. _She can't leave me alone with—_and then all other thoughts cease entirely as she leans in to press a kiss into his cheek. "I'll be right back, okay?" she says, as if to a child; calm, comforting, voice pitched low to soothe. All John can really process is the way her lips felt against his skin.

He thinks, _Rose_, and he closes his eyes again as Melody leaves. Because it really wasn't fair that Melody should get to kiss his cheek, and Rose couldn't. Not one bit at all.

* * *

"Spoilers," he sighs. "I can't believe that woman managed to haunt me here, even in a completely different universe. How _does_ she do it?" And when that doesn't elicit a response: "John."

John opens his eyes, looks at him and says nothing at all. The Doctor sighs again, and makes himself comfortable next to John. He leans his head back against the railing, wrists propped on his raised knees, hands dangling.

"I did what I thought was right," he says finally.

"Yeah, well, it wasn't, was it?"

"No. It wasn't."

John goes back to ignoring him. The Doctor fidgets next to him. Sighs. Scratches his cheek.

It's very hard to ignore someone when they keep on reminding you that they are there.

"A bow tie? Really?"

"Oi! Bow ties are cool. And what about you, with your jeans and your—your _accent? _What _is_ that, Scottish?"

"Yes. Got a problem with that?"

"Oh, you are _so_ Scottish! Why couldn't _I_ have been Scottish? I would have been a great Scotsman."

"You're just not wizard enough, I suppose."

"You are impossible."

"That's the Scottish bits."

Another brief pause.

"I can't _believe_ I regenerated into a baby. Do you get carded everywhere you go?"

"Hey! I like this face! It's a nice face, thank you very much! And I do not get _carded_. I am a mature and responsible adult, and they are able to tell that I am such when I walk up to the door."

"Uh-huh."

"All I'm saying: _so_ Scottish."

* * *

The Doctor watches him when he knows he isn't looking. John clutches the permanent marker in his hand as if it were a lifeline, his knuckles white curling around, and the black mark on the crease of his wrist is a gaping black wound. His clothes are stained with black blood, and his face is grey with exhaustion.

The Doctor watches him when he isn't looking, and wonders uneasily what in the world his counterpart has been doing, to get him to such a state as this.

Because John is not alright at all; he sags against the console and listens to the time rotor turning. It is the most discordant symphony. It is the only sound in their little world; after that initial burst of bickering they had lapsed into this stilted silence. The Doctor isn't sure what, exactly, to ask, and John doesn't really feel like saying anything at all. They're both relieved when Melody comes back in, complaining that she couldn't find any pills.

The Doctor gives her and John some space; they huddle near the door and speak in hushed whispers. He watches Melody, too. He sees the way she looks at John, and the way John doesn't look at her. What exactly is Melody Williams to his counterpart, and why does it not bother him as much as it should? What about Rose?

Melody has not been very forthcoming on the details.

* * *

And you want to know the scariest bit of all?

The Doctor trusts her implicitly. He knows next to nothing about her, but he trusts her. And that hasn't happened, not since **_her_**, and he doesn't like it, not one bit.

But there's something about Melody that just makes him want to help her out of the dust and onto her feet again.

She sort of reminds him of Amy.

* * *

"I'm fine. Melody, seriously, would you quit fussing? I'm _fine."_

"You don't look fine." She adjusts the lapels of his jacket so they hang straight. "You look like death."

"Thanks. Glad for the vote of confidence."

"Any time, dear."

John gives her a funny look. "You've never called me that before."

"No. I wouldn't have."

"Melody."

"John." She can't look at him. She picks at imaginary pieces of lint on his coat, and she can't look him in the eye. Around him the TARDIS hums, and she is old and brilliant and familiar. Oh God. His TARDIS. Such a sexy old thing.

"Here," he says, and hands Melody the marker. "It was very useful."

She hands it back to him. "Keep it. I have others." That's the worst news John's heard all day. Others mean that Melody needs to have a stock of markers; others mean that whenever Melody is in her future, she'll need to have those black lines marring her skin.

And her giving him the marker only means that John will need them too.

"Alright," he says, pocketing the marker instead. "Thanks."

"Oh John. Don't thank me." She smiles at him, a wry twist of her mouth, and he doesn't ever want to see that look in her eyes again: slightly broken, slightly damp around the edges. He prays that he wasn't the one who put it there.

"Are we in our universe still?" He nods behind them to indicate the presence of the original copy. She focuses on the Doctor for a moment, and another smile creases her face, and it is soft and fond and shy.

"Yes."

"Then Melody," he moves in closer to her, putting his hands on her shoulders, shifting so that she's forced to look up at him, "why is he here?"

She hesitates before she tells him, and by the way she pauses between phrases he knows she's editing. "There are . . . cracks in the other universe, and they unwrite time. They were eating up his universe, and they would have spread here, too, to all universes. So to stop them . . ."

"I stepped in and unwrote myself," John says.

"Yes. He did. But my memories weren't affected by the cracks, because they don't exist here. So I remembered him, and he came here." She shrugs. "And it's funny, because I know how to get him back home, too. Because of his memories in the future."

"And where am I? Melody, why am I not here with you?"

"Bad Wolf Bay." This comes from behind them; they turn to face the Doctor, who's standing next to the console. He locks gazes with John. "Bad Wolf Bay," he repeats.

"Ah," John says.

And that's when Jack catches up to them.

* * *

The thing about vortex manipulators is that they can be followed, if you're stubborn enough.

* * *

He comes in, and he has the knife John dropped four thousand years ago in his hands and a vortex manipulator on his wrist and the very first thing he reaches out for is Melody, except John gets in the way first.

For the first time since his arrival John allows the psychic connection with the Doctor to snap into place. For one bright, shining moment he is him and I is me and right, are you sure, of course don't be stupid, I'd do it myself with my own sonic if my hands weren't a bit busy—

And then the Doctor sonics them _back._

The last thing John hears is Melody screaming his name.


	8. a necessary evil

_Four Thousand Years Ago and Two Hours Later_

The TARDIS enfolds them into her, and his hand is slipping on Jack's wrist and the knife is descending and "Melody, run!"

She does, and now he's left to keep Jack from killing him.

Fun times.

* * *

He doesn't see the kick coming, and it knocks him into the console. He feels some of his ribs give away, and he's left crouched halfway under the console, barely able to breathe from the pain.

Jack keeps on coming and coming and coming, and John is backing up against the railing, stumbling up the stairs—_don't let him into the rest of the TARDIS—_and oh God, he's losing. John's losing.

He somehow manages to make a stand in the middle of the stairwell, the tight curve of it impeding Jack's attempts at stabbing him. He's able to knock away the knife from Jack's hand; it falls clattering down to the glass floor below, but for his efforts receives a blow to the face. John reels back. Blood pours from his nose, and behind the throbbing ache from his face he's pretty sure his nose is broken.

He's losing.

Jack grabs him by the lapels of his coat, pulls him toward him. John's legs bang into the stairwell.

He's losing.

"Do you think you could escape?" Jack hisses. "And you forget—I can't kill you. Not yet. But I sure can mess you up, and by God, Johnny boy, I intend to do just that."

John's losing.

* * *

But the TARDIS hates to see her John cry.

* * *

The air corridor she seals around John knocks Jack back several feet; he only manages to not fall by catching the railing. But that hardly really matters, because then she sucks all the air out of the room. John, trapped inside the air corridor, can only watch, wide-eyed, as Captain Jack Harkness, former Time Agent, asphyxiates to death.

And even though he tells himself it isn't true, that it isn't _his_ Jack, it still feels like he is. So as Jack Harkness dies, John weeps for his lost friend.

* * *

_Imagine you had three choices._

_He dies in every way that matters._

_He kills._

_He lives._

_I am sorry he is sad now, but in the myriad of options there was only one I could do that would end in smiles. You understand, right?_

_There was only one._

* * *

He can't look at the body.

The TARDIS opens her doors for him, shifts around the gravity a bit so it's easier to carry. He pauses for a moment at the threshold of the open door, staring out into everywhere. All those tiny bright stars speckled around the exploding star he'll be sending Jack to. The supernova, in all its raw, primal beauty, sweeps through him, and he's reminded inexplicably of flowers. He takes the time to stick Jack's manipulator in his pocket because it might come in handy someday, having one on standby.

He empties Jack out into the howling void of space and the burning flower waiting for him, and he closes his eyes, because despite what this man has done to him here, in another reality they were friends. He cannot bear to see Jack's body shining brightly as it bobs out into space. He deposits the knife there, too, because he cannot bear to look at it. He can't remember why. It spins out into space to be eaten by the flower.

The TARDIS sets the gravity inside her back to Earth Standard, and John closes her doors. His ribs ache and twist inside him, and it's hard to breathe now, so much harder. His bones crumble together inside of him. He takes the stairs back up the central console one step at a time, stopping in between each one, one hand on the rail. Jack hadn't hit him all that much, but it didn't necessarily matter how much you were hit to inflict the most pain, just where.

And Jack had known where.

The salty tang of blood from his nose invades his mouth; it still hasn't stopped bleeding. He stops at the top of the stairs to shrug off his coat. He manages eventually, and presses the whole wad of it to his nose. Points of fire explode outward upon contact, but he applies pressure despite the fact.

One coat ruined.

Trembling, he pulls himself up to the console, pulls the handbrake and sends them out of this space. It doesn't matter where they end up. She'll take them somewhere they can rest for a while; just away and away. She wheezes as she takes them out, and he leans against her metal heart, tears stinging his eyes.

"Oh braveheart. Oh braveheart," he whispers, still leaning heavy on the handbrake. "Oh my dear, sweet, brave girl—you shouldn't have. Not for me." His ribs catch again, and he drops the coat and has to sit down on the floor until the pain passes into a steady ache again. The glass is cool under his thighs. The console rises up above him like the prow of a ship at harbor, and past the lip of the console is the ceiling, which hangs over the whole confection like a swan over her goslings.

Against the catching of his bones his breath hitches again, again, again in pain, and he closes his eyes against it all.

He isn't sure how much time passes before he's able to get up again, but his nose has stopped bleeding. When he does finally stand, he uses the lip of the console as a leverage point to get himself to his feet. He stands there for a moment, swaying, making sure his knees won't give way. No, it'll hold, he decides. He sets off stiff-legged into the depths of his ship.

John has a Melody Williams to find.

* * *

He finds her in his closet. His room doesn't really _need_ a closet, not what with the wardrobe to rummage around in, and he's pretty sure he didn't have a closet this morning, but that is very much not the point. Because Melody is curled up into a ball amongst his old converse (which really shouldn't be here either, come to that), her face buried into her arms curling around her knees.

Slowly he kneels down before her, says, "Melody." She jolts back with a small mewl of fear, arms coming up to protect her face, and he is abruptly and viciously glad that Jack is dead.

Melody should never be that afraid of anyone. Ever.

"Jack's dead. Melody—Melody, it's me. It's John. It's just John."

Slowly her arms come down. Her face is stained with tears. "John?" she croaks. "You're not dead?"

"Do I _look_ dead?"

"Yes."

"_Honestly. _I'm not _that_ easy to ki—" She plows into him, wrapping him in a hug.

Pain, sick and immediate, sweeps over him. He's on the floor, gasping like a dying fish _(unsure how he'd gotten to the floor)_, Melody leaning over him, horrified. "He hurt you!"

"Never said he didn't," he gasps. Slowly the pain fades into the steady ache of broken ribs. He waits a moment longer before sitting up. Melody hovers over him, unable to really do anything at all, with her hands.

"John, what happened?" Melody demands.

John closes his eyes and concentrates on breathing. "A bad day," he says.

* * *

They stand, and John enfolds Melody into an embrace as light as feathers.

She trembles in his arms, and he's trembling, too, and neither one of them says anything for a long, long time. Their breathing is like the fluttering of birds in the stillness.

* * *

Melody watches John shuffle around the TARDIS like an old man. He moves them into the vortex once more, not even bothering to check where they had landed the last time. The TARDIS bellows and wheezes as she takes them along the paths of time and space to the Brothers, but her flight is unusually smooth, and Melody wonders if she had used some sort of stabilizer. John certainly hadn't.

Melody can't help him at all, because of her hands, so she feels absolutely useless. The glass from the stairs is cool under her, and she leans against the railing, tilting her head so that it rests between two of the bars. Tired, she stares at John, not really seeing him anymore.

_Jack is dead._

She figures she can ask John what happened later, after the Brothers have patched him up and he's not in so much pain.

Yes. Later.

She closes her eyes so she won't have to see the white, flat press of his mouth as he struggles to breathe against the pain.

The TARDIS is silent.


	9. hello, future man

Nurse Prin takes in their state with barely a raised eyebrow. Apparently he's seen worse than a man looking half dead, caked in his own blood and sweat, and a girl with ugly hands half supporting him, exiting out of a bright red telephone box which has just materialized inside the lobby.

Melody doesn't want to consider just what, exactly, could be worse.

* * *

"Hm. Red. Cherry red. Cherry, cherry red. That's new. She was blue before."

"Come along John."

"I liked the blue. Such a _nice_ color, blue is. And you like yellow, don't you? You're always wearing it."

Honestly, for a man with broken ribs he sure talks a lot. "Yes John," she says.

_Melody Williams will be careful? And my John, too?_

_We will. Braveheart, what happened?_

But the TARDIS doesn't say anything more.

* * *

The hospital is white, with muted green or blue lighting for the signs and white lighting for everywhere else. All the nurses wear white as well, and they're all men, and they're either human or Catkind. The patients, by contrast, are like bright, exotic birds dropped into all that cool white-green-blue, and those bright birds are everywhere. John and Melody simply disappear into the throng.

Even so, they still sign in as Mr. and Mrs. Jonathan and River Noble, because the Time Agency is big in the 53rd Century. (And while John doesn't mention it, he knows that Jack might still be alive here in Jack's possible past. No, it never hurts to be careful.) She calls him _dear _and he calls her _darling_ and Melody struggles not to laugh.

John gives her a _look_ when she introduces herself as River. _That can wait till later, _says the look she sends back at him. _You're dead on your feet as it is. _He shrugs.

When they are to go their separate ways, he to General and she to Burns, he says, "Well, _darling_, I'll see you in a bit." Because the nurses are watching he also kisses her on the cheek.

Melody blushes.

They are then led their separate ways. Melody looks over her shoulder at him as they go. John creaks along between two of the Catkind, shuffling slowly but steadily.

_A soldier_, she thinks, and allows her nurse to lead her away, too.

* * *

They assess Melody's hands. There's nothing they can do to heal them, they tell her solemnly. The nervous system is too badly damaged. At best, they can graft an organic, polymorphic skin over her hands. It dulls the senses; she won't feel any pain in her hands when she touches things because she won't feel anything at all.

Yes alright, she tells them. Alright.

When it's really not alright at all.

They sit her down in the hospital room. She's in the corner, out of the way of the real serious treatments. They hook her up to the machine that will give her her second layer of skin. It is sterile and white, and clamps down over her hands. But it's a gentle sort of clamping. There's a bright puff of air on the skin of her hands. An antiseptic, they tell her.

The last thing her hands will ever feel.

* * *

Melody falls half asleep against the broad white back of the construct that holds her hands inside its body, listening to the hum and pitch of the machine.

"Hullo."

She jerks upright, startled out of slumber. Her head swings around to the left, in the direction of the voice. It's a male. Human. He stands there awkwardly, arms akimbo, and gives her half a wave when she's looking at him fully.

"May I sit?" he asks. Without waiting for an answer he snags over a nearby chair, sitting down on it backwards. He crosses his arms on the head of the chair, plops his chin on his arms, and proceeds to grin at her.

Melody blinks at him. "Err . . . who're you?"

"The name's Ian."

". . . Melody."

"Yep," he says, popping the "p." "Time-travel," he adds at Melody's questioning look. "Really messes with the head. You always come at things a bit sideways afterwards." He's wearing a vortex manipulator on his wrist. _Ah,_ Melody thinks. River had used one of those.

"Have we met before?" she asks him.

"Maybe not from your end. From _my_ end? Well—spoilers." Ian then proceeds to waggle his eyebrows at her, grinning.

Melody looks at him, sharp. "How do you know about that?"

"About what?"

"That—that word."

Ian shrugs. "It's what you've always said. I've just adopted it for a short while."

"What I say."

"Yes." She eyes him, wary. Ian is easy smooth, with a grin filled with the white strip of his teeth and a spark in his eyes that is bright, alive. Some would call it merry. A scattering of freckles lie across the bridge of his nose and his cheeks, small dim spots in the tan of his face.

"You don't believe me," he adds, amused.

Melody thinks of River.

"No," she says. "I believe you."

Ian is unable to hide his surprise. He doesn't act on it, though, merely grins at her and says, "Good."

Melody smiles back at him, still a bit wary, but brightening considerably to this strange, enigmatic young man. "So, future man, why are you here in my past? I suppose you _do_ have a reason, other than to stop by and say hello."

Ian sighs, leans forward, hands knotting together at the fingers. "You're right, I—"

A high wailing echoes throughout the medical bay. Before anyone has time to react an Absorbaloff, her ceremonial braids swinging almost to her waist, bursts into the room. Panic is etched across her features. She's wearing a bright blue and pink floral patterned dress, and attached to the end of her arm is one of the Catkind nurses, looking entirely too unflappable.

_"I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" _the Absorbaloff woman is shrieking. _"I didn't mean to!"_

"Ma'am, you have to calm down," the nurse soothes.

And John squeaks in through the doors after them, waving the sonic screwdriver over his head. "Hello Melody!" he yells across the room. Melody groans and plunks her head against the machine. Of _course _he would—

"—be in the thick of things," Ian is muttering beside her. "Hang on—let me go get him sorted." It takes Melody a moment to realize that he is talking to her. "Be right back," he informs her, and picks his tall frame up from the chair.

She watches him join the fray in the middle of the room, wondering who this strange, strange creature is.

* * *

_Do you want to know a secret? (That strange creature's a time traveler.)_

* * *

A nurse, human, his bald plate gleaming under the bright fluorescence of the lights, is able to calm the woman down by explaining to her that the consciousness she'd accidently absorbed could be brought back by using a neural relay and uploading them into ganger technology.

"Oh thank heavens," a Raxacoricofallapatorian attached to the side of her neck says, rolling his eyes skywards.

"All I came in for was pentapox!" the Abosrbaloff woman sobs.

"Yes, I'm sure you did," the Catkind nurse attached to her arm soothes, making sure to keep his voice slow pitched and calm. The whole kit was led away by the second nurse, leaving Ian and John standing awkwardly in the middle of the room.

"Ganger technology?" John mutters, arms crossed and squinting a bit.

"You've never heard of it?" Ian asks, surprised.

"Weell, I've _heard_ of it, but that was a sitcom. _I Live Next Door. _Funny, but the actress was a bit spotty. The actual actress, not her ganger co-star. Lovely purple skin . . . and _who_ are _you?"_

"Ian."

"Yes—well yes, no—who _are _you?"

"Changing the inflection won't make me any more likely to tell you."

John flushes red and turns towards Ian, ready to berate, but Ian is already loping away back to Melody, hands in pockets and whistling.

* * *

"I don't like him. He's rude."

"John!" Melody frowns at him. Her hands are stuck in that machine, and she looks like a bit like a disgruntled penguin. He raises an eyebrow at her, leans against of the contraption that's eaten her hands.

"What? I _don't_ like him." He turns towards Ian. "I don't like you. And I'm not afraid to say it to his face. He's rude."

Ian's lips twitch, as though he's struggling not to laugh. "You're no spring daisy yours—"

"Say, Melody! How are your hands going? What have they done? What can they do?"

Melody looks at the swallowed ends of her wrists. She says, "Oh, well. They can fix it. I won't be in pain anymore. But, um."

"Um?" John prompts. He pulls out the sonic from the back pocket of his jeans. He'd stuffed it there when he'd realized that a) his jacket was still on the console floor and b) there wasn't much he could do to help the Absorbaloff woman with it. He wonders whether they have a stabilizing unit for the gangers to, well, stabilize afterwards. They'd needed one in the sitcom, but that had been the 49th century, and this is the 51st and a completely different universe on top of that _and_ an awful lot could have happened in 200 some-odd years. Even so, the TARDIS could probably stabilize them. In a pinch. Statistically. Probably.

He sonics the machine he's leaning against, scans the readings while he waits for Melody's answer. "Hang on," he says, frowning at the readings. "Hang on-on-on—Melody, this machine is a—"

"Yes, I know. They told me."

"And it's—"

"Yes."

"Will you _quit_ interrupting? This is grafting a second skin over your hands—but it's not really skin, it's more of a thin metal alloy organic mixture thing that quite frankly I haven't bothered memorizing the name to. But I should have. Dulls the nerve endings. In the forty-second century it was used as a mercy grant for executions, so the victims wouldn't, err—" He stutters to a halt. "You really don't need to know that, actually. _I_ didn't need to know, but they told me anyways. Last request type of thing."

"No, I didn't particularly need to."

"Sorry. Sorry."

"That's alright." She knows he's talking about more than just an insensitive comment. "Not your fault."

"Yeah, well."

Melody bites her lip, blurts out, "How're you?" John raises an eyebrow at her. "They—your ribs are alright? Your nose? There was so much—so much blood."

"Head wounds do that," he acknowledges. "Yeah, they patched me up alright. Fit as a whistle. Going to have a crook in my nose, though." He rubs the crook in question with his fingers. "My bones, they knit together too fast, what with me being part, well, and I didn't want them re-breaking anything more than necessary. It was painful enough with the ribs."

"Painful? Didn't they give you any pain medication?"

"He doesn't like them." This from Ian. "They give him headaches. He probably refused to take anything."

"Headaches? You get _headaches?"_ Her voice rose a bit in alarm; John shoots a glance at Ian, irritated. Passing the sonic from hand to hand, he sighs. "It's not that big of a deal. I just get headaches sometimes is all. Pain medication makes them—weell, any kind of medication, really—makes them easier to come on." And when Melody continues to stare at him, appalled: "They're not that bad."

Ian snorts. "They're _not," _John insists. "I can _handle_ them. I've _been_ handling them and would you _quit _doing that?" This last is directed towards Ian, who raises an eyebrow.

"Doing what? All I'm doing is standing here."

"Exactly. You're staring. Stop it. Go somewhere else."

"Hm. You're deflecting. He's deflecting; doesn't want us to talk about those headaches." Ian turns away from Melody to stare at John. "You're just so _young._ Both of you. It's weird seeing you guys like this."

"Young? _Young?_ I'm _not_ young. Why does everyone think that I'm _young?_ First that woman, now _you—"_

"Well you _are._ You're being, quite frankly, extremely irrational and angry. Why are you so angry?"

Melody looks between the two men, nervous. They're squaring off, toe to toe. John is beet red, and Ian is calm, cool. Deliberate.

"Look," John growls, pointing the sonic in Ian's face, "I've had a _very_ bad day. Someone has just tried to kill me, and frightened my friend, and _hurt_ her. And now I have someone from the future—_my_ relative future, mind you—poking around where he is unwanted? Yeah, that bugs me."

"Hm," Ian says, completely unmoved by the angry man practically spitting in his face. "Interesting. You really _do_ have an anger problem this young, don't you?"

"_Excuse me."_ The nurse's voice is like frost. "This is a _hospital ward_, gentleman. If you refuse to quiet down I will have to ask you to leave." His gaze fixes on Ian with suspicion. "And who are you? My records do not show the Noble family coming in with more than two people."

John coughs, shifts his weight to the balls of his feet. "He's my brother. Arrived a bit late; he was so distressed upon hearing what happened to my wife here that he didn't bother checking in. Ian Noble: look him up, if you feel the need to."

"Hm." The nurse doesn't look convinced, but decides to let the matter drop. He turns towards Melody, asks, "How are you feeling, Mrs. Noble? The procedure shouldn't take much longer."

"Oh, I'm doing just fine, thank you. Just listening to these two idiots over here argue—something about a broken toy when they were little, I'm afraid. Never quite got over it. Isn't that right, dear?"

"Oh absolutely, darling. Abso-lonsy-lutely."

* * *

The machine is opened. Melody's hands lie there, exposed, naked inside of the pale blue translucence of the skin graft. "You can lift your hands out now, Ms. Noble," the nurse informs her kindly.

"Er, right." Melody pulls them out. The nurse wipes the residual skin graft off with a towel.

"There," he says, "all done." He's meaning to be kind, but all his kindness does makes Melody want to cry.

Her hands. They're oddly shiny in color, like saran wrap, and where there are scars the skin resembles oil.

No. They're definitely not beautiful. But they don't hurt, either. They don't anything; she holds them up, and they kind of hang there, and after a final minute of her staring at them she twists them into her lap, where they then proceed to bang awkwardly into one another. "Thank you," she tells the nurse. "Thank you. Thank you."

But her heart really isn't in it.

She makes to get out of the hospital chair, but she misjudges where she's placed her hands and one over shoots the arm of the chair and spirals off and away. Melody almost falls, but John catches her last minute. "Thanks," she mutters, flushing. Hands on her shoulders, he helps guide her up out of the chair. "It's just hard, knowing where to—knowing that I've placed them right when I can't _feel_ that I've placed them anywhere at all."

"It'll take some getting used to," he acknowledges. He picks up her hands, brings them up to eye level for inspection. Melody eyes him; any trace of his earlier anger has vanished, but she knows that it's more than likely still there. He's probably just sitting on it. "But we'll work on it. Hey, they did a good job on these." If she was the nurse Melody would think that his surprise was insulting; as it is all she does is say, "Did they really?"

"Yeah, yeah, they did. The seam is near invisible; you wouldn't be able to tell at all the skin graft was there, unless you actually _knew._ And now your skin's all rainbow-y."

"Rainbow-y?"

"Of course rainbow-y! All around your scars, see? And rainbows are—are—" His mouth worked, trying to come up with a word, and finally settled on, "They're cool."

Melody blinks at him. "Cool?" she echoes.

"Yeah, cool. I like them. Rainbows are cool." He pauses. "Not much else is though. Weell except for maybe pears. I like pears. Rainbows and pears."

"Hrm." The nurse clears his throat. John and Melody jump, look at him. "Will you come to the front desk to talk about a method of payment?"

John stares at the nurse blankly. "Payment? With money?"

The nurse gives John a look. "Of course, Mr. Noble. Is there any other way?"

"Indentured servitude?" John squeaks.

* * *

Melody absolutely refuses to let John use a piece of psychic paper to get them out of the mess. "It's cheating," she informs him. "I've never approved of you using it, even when you were the Doctor, and especially not now that I can actually _say_ something about it. And _where _in the _world_ did you even get psychic paper anyhow?"

John buttons up a bit at that, but his gaze flicks side long to Ian. "I-_an!"_ Melody scolds.

He raises his hands in denial. "Hey, hey, don't look at me. Blame _her._"

"She _would_ be the one," Melody mutters, while John looks at them in confusion.

"Who? What?" he splutters.

Nurse Prin, who is still on his shift at the front desk, scowls at them, whiskers twitching with annoyance. Melody's nurse stands next to him, and he is also bristling with annoyance. "Stalling can be tried in a court of law," he informs them. "_Especially_ stalling to pay medical bills."

"Well erm, ah, erm, ah . . ." John stumbles. He and Melody exchange glances.

Ian shoves his way between the two of them, rolling his eyes. "Since neither of you two thought to plan ahead—here." Pulling out a thin grey placard from his back pocket, he hands it to Nurse Prin. Both nurses peer at the placard for a moment, then stare at Ian. Finally Nurse Prin squeaks, "O-o-oh. Yes, of course. Agent 789! I hadn't recognized you. I-I—"

"Don't worry about it," Ian reassures him. "Just . . . don't remember that I was here, alright? The security of the galaxy's at stake if I don't get Mr. and Mrs. Noble out here as soon as possible. We only really had enough time to stop for medical attention."

"What medical attention?" Nurse Prin says, face a bit wan.

"Exactly," Ian says, winking at the nurses and giving them a quick smile. He takes the placard back from them, stuffs it back into his back pocket. He turns towards Melody and John, ushering them away. "Come along, Noble troupe. Time to skedaddle. Ach—skedaddle. Rubbish. Never using _that_ again."

* * *

The TARDIS had apparently upon their absence drifted over a few feet to the left, making the front entryway of the TARDIS a bit harder to see from reception than it had previously. They stop in front of the doors, awkward. John immediately rounds on Ian, face flat with fury. "You're a _Time Agent?_" he hisses, backing Ian into the TARDIS doors. "Did they _send_ you? You're here to spy on us, aren't you? Tell them where we are?"

"_No!"_ Ian protests. "No, I'm _not._ I _was_ a part of the Agency, but that was two years ago and it was _only_ to learn how to work _these_!" He waves around the arm with the vortex manipulator. "So _back off."_

They glare at one another.

"John." She places a hand on his arm. He looks down at her, scowling.

_"What?"_ he snarls. Because John is really, really not in the mood.

"I trust Ian," she informs him, simple and direct. He turns away from her, snorting.

"_John. _I do, okay? I _do. _And besides, if he was going to turn us in already he would have." But the stiff set of his shoulders tells her he's not ready to listen.

She turns towards Ian. "I'm sorry. He's just—"

"Angry," Ian finishes for her. "He's just angry."

John studiously ignores both of them.

"You said you had something for me?" Melody reminds Ian. He brightens considerably, and says, "Eh, that's right! Not that I hadn't, y'know, actually forgotten or anything. I was just wondering if I shouldn't give it to you later, what with Mr. Grumpy over here, but since you asked—" From his back pocket he pulls out a brown paper package roughly the size of a medium sized hatbox. When he hands it over to Melody, he makes sure that her hands are curled all the way around it before letting go.

Being without feeling in your hands is a disconcerting thing. Melody hasn't really had the time to appreciate it before, because everything has been just light touches, but now with the weight of the box in her hands she has no other choice but to notice. How the box simply wouldn't be there in her hands, if not for the pull of its weight on the rest of her arms. How she can even forget it's there, because she can't feel the corners, the rough rasp of the tape keeping the corner flaps together, the rough smoothness of the wrapping paper.

Since focusing on her hands makes her depressed, Melody asks Ian, "You're pockets are bigger on the inside?"

He nods. "Normally it'd be my old anorak, but that was left behind earlier on. So she gave me pockets that happen to be bigger inside."

"And by 'she' you mean . . ."

"Precisely." This raises a whole new kettle of fish, for if Braveheart liked him enough (or will like him enough, come to that) to give him pockets bigger on the inside . . . Melody glances over at John. The TARDIS hasn't even done that for him yet. Or she's pretty sure the TARDIS hasn't. Pretty sure.

"How do you know us, Ian?" Melody asks him.

He grins at her, and that spark is back in his eyes again. "Spoilers," he says.

Melody laughs at him. "Figured you would say that." Behind her she is very aware of John bristling in indignation. "Well, I suppose we must go. I'd offer you a lift, but—"

"Nah, no need. I have this, remember?" And he waves the arm with the vortex manipulator around again. "I can get around perfectly well on my own."

"Right." They stand there, awkward again. Breaking the mood, John shoulders his way past Ian into the TARDIS proper, leaving the door open behind him. They both stare after him, Melody a bit wide-eyed.

"Don't mind about him," Ian tells her. "He'll come around."

"Yeah . . ." Melody stares after John, eyes narrowed. "I have to admit, I'm a bit irritated with him."

"And he's probably a bit irritated with you." Ian's gaze is fond. "Don't worry—you guys'll work it out. Probably have a fantastic row, and then you can make up later."

"I'm not quite sure if I _want _to have fantastic row." Ian shrugs.

"He's had a bad day. He's angry, but he won't want to take that anger out on anyone, _especially_ you. But if he doesn't he'll just keep it bottled up inside and the more it's bottled up the worse it'll get."

"So you're basically telling me to get in there and have a row with him."

"Did you hear me say that? I never said that."

Melody hesitates. "You know him. Really well, I mean. John. You know John."

"Yeah," Ian admits. "I do." A soft smile curls the corner of his mouth; Melody watches it, sees the way this one little smile softens the entirety of his face far more than any of that bright vivacity of his grins ever could.

"Take care of yourself Ian," she tells him, sincere. _Take care of yourself; take care._

"Yeah. Same to you." He stuffs his hands into the front pocket of his jeans, rocks back onto his heels. "Be seein' you in a few."

"Yeah. Thanks, Ian." Even though she isn't quite sure what she's thanking him for.

Heb rushes away her thanks. "Nah. You'd have done the same for me. We're _friends_, Melody. Best get used to it."

"Looking forward to it."

He winks at her.

There really isn't much else left to say after that. Tucking the package under her arm, Melody and Ian shake hands. She cannot feel the corners of his hand, and she can only tell that she's grasping anything at all by the drag the action has on the rest of her.

Strange and sad.

"Goodbye, Ian."

"Hullo Melody. Catch you later."

And she closes the TARDIS door behind her.

* * *

The rush of wind blows his hair back and rattles his shirt. The TARDIS disappears along the railways of time, falling through space with that familiar bumpy rattle of a key sawing along piano wires: _vworp-vworp, vworp-vworp._ Not traditionally lovely, but still lovely all the same.

Still lovely.

Ian watches until she disappears, her last whispered command echoing through his mind: _Ian Noble will be safe-making._

He promises her he will be. Well, as safe as he ever is. Which is badly.

Whistling, he saunters out of the hospital. The day outside is bright and the city on the distant waterline sparkles across the bay like jewels caught in the noonday sun, all the windows catching fractals of light and throwing it out. The air is soaked with the smell of apples. Green, tart ones, with the juice squirting sour along the inside and down your throat.

Ian pulls the list out of his pocket. It's a bit crumpled from being squashed under the package. He uncrumples it, checks the next coordinates.

_5) Sigma D 9-435678: The Alvarix Gardens._

He inputs the coordinates into the manipulator. With a crack and flash he is gone, off into the past or the future. He has some gardens to get to.


	10. they have a fantastic row

**A/N: Thank you everyone for your lovely reviews so far. They really make my day, hearing what you guys think about Melody and John. And apparently their official ship name is Melohn now; thanks to RiotousUndead for that. ~madis**

* * *

_Somewhere in Deep Space_

She stands just inside the door, bracing herself against the doorframe as the TARDIS rumbles through the Vortex. Once they stop she takes a quick peek out the windows of the door. Stars drift lazily past, all teeny and far away. So it'll be drifting through deep space then. She's glad; it's been a long day. Looking at John standing next to the console, she finds it hard to believe that just this morning they'd bantered over how daft he'd looked. That seems worlds away, now.

"John," she begins, hesitantly, and her voice drops like a stone into the thick hum of the console room. "John, why were you so rude to that boy? Ian, I mean. Because you were very, very rude."

"Boy?" John snorts. "He's not a boy—he's older than you are." He's been standing, hands clenching the console railing, staring down at the parking brake; now he turns towards her in one swift movement, gaze sharp, voice biting. Melody quails just a bit under the weight of John's anger, because it has all the weight of the Oncoming Storm behind it, and the man John is swept thin against it. Then she rallies, because it's _John_. John, who cares for her hands, who has had a _very_ bad day. John, no matter how much he's acting like the Doctor right now.

"I'm only twenty-three!" she bites back, and as rejoinders go it's a rubbish one, but Melody's never been good at having rows.

John, on the other hand, is all too good at having them. "And I'm nine hundred and ten, but I don't see what that has to do with anything! He's shady, Melody—I don't trust him. Why is he here? Who is he working for? Who sent him? He admitted he was a part of the Time Agency, and we were just almost killed by the Time Agency. They're private contractors. Someone had to have hired them, and we both know who'd sincerely like to see us dead."

"Who? Rose?"

"Yes Rose!" he growls, and if he wasn't so angry Melody would have laughed at the absurdity of it all. "Who else has—but we're _not_ talking about Rose. We're talking about Ian."

"Yes, we were." Melody sighs, walks up the steps to John. He's standing there, arms folded, posture tense. Setting the package down on top of the console, she bends down and picks his jacket up off the floor; she'd noticed it before, but hadn't had the hands to do so, and John had been in too much pain. She folds it over her arm, smoothes out a crease before looking at him. "John, what is this really about? Why are you so angry?"

"I'm _not_ angry," he insists, his brogue coming out thick and fast. "I just don't trust him."

"Well I do. He—He reminds me of River."

At this John's eyebrows shoot all the way up. "River. As in 'Professor River Song, archaeology' River? The one who _died?_ How do you know about her?"

"I—I told you, I _dream—"_

"No. That's _not_ what I meant, and you _know _that. You picked—out of all the names you could've picked—you picked _that_ name as a pseudonym. Melody, _why?_ _Why_ does my TARDIS show you my dreams? Why _you? _Why _River? _Who is she to you?" He stands there, arms akimbo, staring at her. She can't look at him, smoothes his jacket down over her arm, a repetitive motion that she doesn't even really notice, because she can't feel it happening.

The words are stuck in her, because she's _never_ talked about River before, and she isn't sure how to begin now. Instead of answering him she demands, "And what about you, John? I'll be the first to admit that I haven't told you everything, but you've kept secrets too."

"Like what?"

"Well, your headaches, for one. You probably weren't even going to mention those until you were right in the middle of one. How can I be prepared if I don't _know—"_

"I _told_ you, I _handle_ those," he snaps.

"Or Rose! Or the Tyler's; they never came to visit me after awhile, not after Rose came back smelling of blue ozone and by that point I was in too much of a drugged stupor to even _care._ Or—Or what happened with Jack? Why was he here? Why did Rose—and I'm assuming it's Rose—why did she—?"

John flushes purple, roars, "We are _not_ talking about Rose bloody Tyler, Melody!"

"Why _not_ John? Why _not?_ It's _healthy_ to talk about things, and while I know it hasn't been a long time for you, you can't keep things bottled up inside! Why do you think the Doctor—" Melody stutters to a halt.

"The Doctor?" John says. And when she won't even _look_ at him: "Melody, the Doctor _what."_

"Why do you think the Doctor died alone?" she whispers, all the fight going out of her.

"That is a _lie,"_ John snarls.

"I don't lie, John. He ended up dying alone because he let everyone go—he let everyone _leave_ him, and refused to go to _any_ of his friends, and he died alone. He was _scared_, John, he was _scared, _and there wasn't _anything _I could do, all I could do was _dream_, and do you know how horrible it is to stand there and do _nothing?"_

She knows that is exactly the wrong thing to say the minute she says it. John takes a half a step towards her, sways back as though shot. His voice, when it comes, is calm and dry as a casket. "Melody. Shut up. I wouldn't _do _that. I swore to myself I wouldn't go through that again, not like with Gallifrey."

"Well you did, and you were _scared."_

John lets out an angry burst of air, almost a growl, and paces away from Melody, his footfalls clacking on the glass floor. Melody stares down at her shoes, and smoothes smoothes smoothes his jacket over her arm. He turns back to her, a violent twist, and spits, "They died. The Tyler's died."

"W-What?"

"They died. That's why they never came to visit you."

"Oh," she says. Pete and Jackie and baby Tony, who had loved stars even at such a young age: all dead? "Is that why Rose—is that why she snapped?" Immediately Melody wishes she hadn't said it. John's face drains of all color, and he strides towards her, his long legs making short work of it, eating the ground. He gets right up into her face, whispers, "Don't you _ever_ talk about her to me again. Don't you _dare. _You don't have the _right."_

"The right? The _right? _She was my friend too, John. I refuse to be—I _refuse_ to be one of your companions who you never tell anything to, who you keep in the dark. I need to be your friend, John, not—not your _hamster._"

"My _hamster_?" he repeats, incredulous.

"Yes, your hamster. I'll be willing to tell you anything and everything only if you're willing to do the same for me. It's called respect."

Then she puts the jacket down on the railing next to her, steps around John, and sails up the stairs, head held high. (Trying ever so desperately not to cry.)

* * *

As Melody disappears around the curve of the stairwell, John considers going after her, decides against it, and swears viciously. He kicks the stair railing with his foot, hops up and down, grabbing his foot, because kicking things _hurt_, definitely not kicking things when angry again. He adds that to his rule list right alongside "Do Not Punch the Wall When Angry, The Wall Will Win" and "Count to Three," the latter of which he had learned during his therapy sessions.

"I'm so _stupid_," he grumbles to himself, cramming his hands into his hair, making a spectacular mess of it all. "Stupid, stupid, _stupid_ John."

* * *

Once the few tears she did allow had dried into her pillow, Melody considers her options. She's _yelled_ at him, really, properly yelled at him. While a part of her is a little bit horrified, most of her is still too angry to feel much shame. John had been acting completely ridiculous.

_And he can kick me out if he wants_, Melody decides, rebellious._ I'll just refuse to leave, is all. He_ needs _someone, and right now I'm all he's got._ She isn't sure why, exactly, he needs her; it's different from Ian Chesterton, or Donna or Rory. John doesn't need a morality chain.

But a friend—maybe.

_If he still wants to be my friend_, she things, morosely, hugging her pillow to her chest, curling around its soft lumpy pillow-y-ness like an old, familiar friend.

_Of course my John still wants Melody Williams to be his friend. Don't be _stupid_. Melody Williams has been my John's best friend for life._

A moment's pause, as it registers.

"Braveheart!" Melody exclaims, forgetting to think the message in her excitement. "You're okay!"

_Of course I am safe-making. I was speaking with Ian N—with Ian. Delightful company, he is. Same as Melody Williams. Both wonderful._

"You can talk to him. I thought that was just me, because I was connected with the original TARDIS. Which is something I still don't really understand, by the by."

_Not just you. Ian too. Wonderful company, Ian is. He made me feel better._

Melody's brow creases in concern for her friend. "Feel better? You were sad?"

There's a wriggling twist from the TARDIS, a considering of dodging away from the subject. Then:_ I killed him. The wrong one. The one who hurt you. I—I didn't know what else to_ do. Her tone is that of a frightened child, lost in the supermarket. _I didn't know what to—my John would have been much sadder, and Melody Williams might have left if I didn't do something, and the wrong one was going to hurt everything._

"Oh braveheart. Oh dear, brave one." Turning, the sheets tangling around her legs, Melody presses herself against the wall, arms flat against it, as far as she can reach. As close to a hug as she can get.

There's a curling, as the TARDIS wraps herself around Melody's mind, a tug as she hugs back. They stay like that for a while, the TARDIS buried down deep inside the moment, all her halls and corridors slightly more unmanned than they would have been otherwise.

"I'm not going to leave him," Melody promises fiercely. "I'm not going to leave John. I promise. I promise."

They pull away from each other after a while, Melody moving back to the center of her bed, the TARDIS further back into her many, many rooms. With a start Melody realizes that she is crying, and she swipes at the tears with the backs of her fingers. She hadn't cried since her father's funeral, and twice in one day?

_You're waking your heart up. With my John and me,_ the TARDIS explains. _It's a right wonderful thing to see._

"Yeah. I suppose you're right," Melody says. Then, because she is curious, she asks, "How do you know Ian?"

_Oh. Ian. Ian. Ian Noble. I've known him always, just as I've known Melody Williams always._

Melody blinks. "Ian Noble?"

And while it is true that there are presumably many people with the surname of Noble in the universe, the coincidence is too great.

"Braveheart, tell me who he is," Melody demands. "Tell me who he is to John."

This time there is no hesitation on the TARDIS's part, no spoilers, because, well, Melody Williams already knows in the future perfect, so why not bother telling her in the past-present-now?

_Ian Noble is the son of my John,_ the TARDIS says, lightly, easily._ And a bad, bad wolf ate his mother._

* * *

Rose. It always comes down to Rose.

* * *

She remembers when she met Rose properly. Properly, because the first time had been Rose snatching Melody's Doctor-doodled napkin from the cafeteria table, and right after that Melody Williams' father had died. So no, it wasn't a proper meeting, but it was what brought Melody to Rose's attention.

And that's how it all had started, Melody and Rose. Why _everything_ had started.

* * *

When they've gotten her cleaned up (because a week of complete and total apathetic depression tends to do that to a person), they leave her to wait in an office on the top floor. There's a window replacing one of the walls; its letting in tons of sunlight, almost too bright. She can see the whole of the city from this vantage point; everything looks small and far away, like a dream fading away between that moment of awake and asleep. There's a potted fern in the corner, and its because of the pink pencil holder on the desk that Melody isn't surprised that the person who finally walks into the office is wearing jeans, a leather jacket, and sneakers.

She sits on the other side of the desk, her back to the window. She and Melody eye one another. She's Peroxide blonde, and in some circles can be considered pretty. Melody isn't sure what this woman sees in her, but after a moment she smiles.

"Hello Miss Williams," she says. "My name is Rose Tyler. Welcome to Torchwood."

And somehow they became friends after that. Melody still isn't sure how.

And then Rose came back crackling blue radiation, for that last time, and everything fell apart.

Melody still isn't sure how.

* * *

"It's only been four days, two recuperating from almost dying, and two awake with John," Melody whispers out into the stillness of the room. "Only four days since we've known one another. It shouldn't—it shouldn't hurt so badly. That Ian's their son. Rose and John. He's their son. It shouldn't hurt." She rolls over, burying her face into her pillow, effectively trapping her arms underneath her. "I don't know what to_ do,_" she groans into her pillow. "I don't even know _why_ I'm sad."

_Perhaps Melody Williams can make my John tea?_ the TARDIS suggests. _My John loves tea._

"Tea as an apology?" Melody croaks, her voice still a bit froglike from her earlier cry. She sits up, rubs at her eyes. "Will that work?"

_My John loves tea_, the TARDIS repeats, insistent.

"Well," Melody sighs, "it's worth a shot." She gets out of bed, tugging down her shirt and slipping on the sky-blue slippers John had found for her in the wardrobe.

Time to go make apology tea.


	11. and then there's some tea

The TARDIS opens up Melody's door into the kitchen rather than the hallway, to save Melody the walk. _Thank you, _Melody tells her, grateful that she won't have to run into John any sooner than is strictly necessary.

It's a different kitchen from breakfast this morning, which had been reminiscent of an outdoor Spanish-style oven-and-patio ensemble, all over green plants, bright yellow walls, pueblo style counters with brick red tiling, and an iron wrought table and chairs.

The walls are still yellow, but they're softer, less fierce, more golden pastel. A color very similar to buttercups, in fact. The formica countertops are white, and the stove and fridge are stainless steel, as before. The thick slabs of stone that make up the floor are cool under her feer, and there is a blue rag-rug on the floor in front of the sink.

Melody stops for a moment at the open door, surprised. "It's different," she says. "Should have expected it, I suppise—but I like it."

She walks forward, running her hand over the table as she passes it, which is now a solid oak slab, to match with the the chairs. She fingers one of the yellow-blue-yellow striped placemats (there are three of them, one for each chair).

_I like my kitchen, _the TARDIS says, pleased with herself. _I think I'll keep it. Blue and yellow—both my John's and Melody Williams's colors. I'll be changing the counters, though; I know I don't like the white._

Laughing at her, Melody begins to rummage through the counters, looking for the tea. "You're turning into a right proper interior decorator, you are," she says, keeping most of her focus on making sure she doesn't knock anything over with her hands.

Because they really are such clumsy creatures.

* * *

Making tea really is a very painstaking process when you don't have full, proper use of your hands. It takes Melody much longer to brew a simple pot of tea than it should have, and she doesn't even bother pouring anything, she just loads everything up onto a tea tray, remembering last minute to snag a pear for John and an apple for her.

The TARDIS stops her at the door. _Wait! Wait wait wait for a minute. I would like to open the kitchen door for Melody Williams,_ she says. There's a moment's pause of concentration, and then she adds, _I've never opened a door intentionally before. I mean, I've changed doors and the temporal spaces between them, but often times it's really the simpler things that are more complicated._There's another long pause.

"Braveheart?" Melody says at last. "If you wouldn't—wouldn't mind—tray's going a bit wobbly here—"

_Oh yes! Right. Forgot I haven't already done it. Tenses are such funny things! _She opens the door to reveal John standing there, hand raised to knock, Melody's package tucked under his arm.

"Melody!" he exclaims at once. "I, er, I, ah, er, yeah, I'm kind of—no, not kind of, I'm really. Really really, er, yeah, and here—" He thrusts the package towards her, face looking as if a bright pink light was shining on it. "Er, uh. This is the kitchen, but it was the door to your room. Odd. Weell, not really, not this being the TARDIS, and her being so young, and er, ah, you have tea," he finishes lamely, package sagging in his hands.

"O-Oh, yes," Melody says. "It's—It's an apology. For you."

"Ah. Yes. Well." The package fumbles back a bit, close to his chest now, awkward in his hands. Neither one of them are quite sure where to look.

"There's, um—the flowers should be absolutely smashing," he blurts out, "and when I wandered in there looking for your room I'm pretty sure there was a grassy knoll and as close to a babbling brook as the TARDIS can replicate, and the TARDIS, she doesn't allow any carnivorous plants on board, so that rules that particular problem out." He stops abruptly, as if someone had pressed pause on the remote, and stares at her expectantly, looking for all the world like a beaky, scruffy-feathered owl.

She shifts the tray into a sturdier position in her hands, stares back at him. "I'm sorry, what?"

The pink light grows ever steadily brighter on John's face. "Do you want to go with me?" he mumbles, gaze more or less glued to the package in his hands. He turns it over and over, his fingers tumbling the corners. "I can go grab a blanket. Um, talk. About things. If you want." He scratches his neck, an unconscious tick.

A pink light begins to shine on Melody's face, too. "Oh," she says. "Um. Yeah. Sure. Sounds lovely. Lovely. Really lovely. A nice, lovely, proper date—" She stops, horrified. "Although of course not a date. No, not that kind of—no, um, no—"

"No, of course not!" he exclaims vehemently, head bobbing up and down. "Never ever!"

"Never ever ever!" she agrees. "Ever. I mean, look at you! You're a—a—"

"Exactly! A long streak of—of—biological metacrisis nothing I am!"

"Yes. Exactly. Like a twig! But less than a twig, because a twig is, you know, something."

"Oh. Ah. Less than a twig, you say? Really?"

"Oh," she says in her turn. "No. More like a branch."

"Hm." He pauses, considering that. "A branch? Yeah, I can see that."

"Really?"

"Mhm."

"Huh."

"Yeah."

Melody stares down at the tray in her hands, John up at the ceiling.

"Sooo," he drawls out finally, "you wanna go, or . . .?"

"No, yeah, of course! You promised me a grassy knoll."

"So I did."

And then they're grinning at one another, looking like a couple of proper idiots, and everything's alright again.

* * *

"So let me get this straight: after I run into River Song at Asgard, all the Time Lords come back, try to destroy the universe (again) and the _Master, _of all people, saves everyone—are you sure you got that one right?"

"Yes, John. I'm sure."

"Huh. Who'd have thought he'd have it in him."

They're lying back in the grass, the remains of the tea cups, the teapot, and the pear strewn around them. Melody's apple lies uneaten next to her. John's mostly on the blanket, Melody's mostly off; her hair fans out from her head, curling in the grass, ribbons or red snakes. They're both on their backs, staring up at the sky visible from the glass skylights up above and foliage of the trees. Melody had asked John how that's possible, having a sky inside the TARDIS; he'd mumbled something about pocket dimensions and she'd left it at that.

"The Master saves everyone," John continues, "and then I save Wilf, who knocks four times, which is ironic, because who'd have thought _Wilf_, of all people—"

"Yes, John. I know."

"And then I regenerate, into the funny faced one I met up with future you, and then I meet someone named Amelia Pond, and become her imaginary friend. She's in love with this bloke called Rory, and they get married after we all and River restart the universe, and then someone tries to kill me, using Amy and Rory's baby, Melody, who turns out to be River, who tries to kill me _twice, _and then I _marry her? _Am I _insane_? My age has finally caught up with me, hasn't it?"

Melody rolls onto her stomach to look at him, her hair falling into her face. She brushes it impatiently away; he's mostly smiling, and when she catches his eye he winks at her. "What mad sort of person comes up with this stuff?" he asks. "I mean, honestly, it's sensational, but if it hadn't actually happened I'd pronounce it strange fiction indeed."

"Quoting Shakespeare won't help you any." She rests her head on her arms. John raises an eyebrow.

"You know Shakespeare?" he asks.

"Your surprise insults me," she tells him. "I happened to be the fool for the school's _Twelfth Night. _Dad brought me flowers."

"Who was the Rory Williams of this universe."

"Yep."

"And you're River. You're River Song."

"Melody actually."

"Well, you're what River could have been. That such a close possibility that the TARDIS—my old TARDIS, not braveheart here—was able to latch onto your dreams and show you mine. His. Mine, and then when they became his, his. But _why?"_

"I dunno. I'm still figuring that one out."

"Hm." There's a moment of silence; Melody begins to pick some of the flowers surrounding her, mostly daisies and a few dandelions.

"So . . . future me," she begins hesitantly, "she was with the Doctor, then? I'll actually meet him one day?"

"Well actually you already have—me."

"You're as close to the Doctor as anyone can get, yes, but you're mostly John to me. So it's different." She begins to thread the flowers together, her fingers making clumsy work of it, bruising the stems.

"Hm," John says. "I know—they used to call me Doc, you know, down at Torchwood. Doc Foreman. It almost became my first name, in a way, Doc did. So even then I was classifying myself a separate . . . That's why I was so surprised, you know, why I didn't respond right away when you called me John. _Nobody_ called me John, not even Rose . . ."

Melody looks up from the flowers, gaze sharp. All she can see of him from her vantage point is his profile. He's still on his back, staring up at the undersides of the fruit trees inside of the garden, and the top of the ceiling with its skylights, and the bright noon day sky above that. His face is calm, somewhat stern, the thin press of his mouth relaxed but unyielding. One of his arms is flung up over his head, the other one resting over the flat plane of his stomach.

Hesitant, her gaze fixed on his face, remembering _don't you **dare** talk about rose bloody tyler, _Melody says, "She loved you, you know. Rose did. I—I don't know what happened, but when she would—she did."

"No, Melody," John sighs. "She loved the Doctor. She loved what I could've been with a little less Donna in me. But I would've married her—well, I'd still marry her, if I could—we could've been happy. We could've made it work." He stops talking abruptly, and when he rolls over onto his side to look at her Melody's staring down at the flowers.

"You're horribly easy to talk to, you know," John adds. "And what in the world are you doing to the poor flowers?" He sits up abruptly, snagging the ones that are in a little pile before her and dumping them into his lap. Melody's left holding the two in her hands; they hang limp, bright yellow against the red curtained backdrop of her hair hanging over her shoulders.

Melody raises her eyebrows at him. "I'm _trying_ to make a daisy chain." She scowls half-ruefully down at the flowers in her hands. "It's not going too well though. Because of my hands—it's hard to do the delicate things."

"I imagine it will be. But you'll be alright; it'll just take practice, is all." Picking up one of the daises from the pile in front of him, he pierces the stem with his thumbnail, threads a dandelion through the hole he'd made.

"John," she asks, startled, "what are you doing?"

"What does it _look_ like I'm doing? I'm making a crown. Out of daisies and dandelions. Shut up," he adds, because he catches her smirk. "Donna used to go to the park all the time with Grandad, and she'd make flowers to put in his hair. Mum'd never take her." And then he stops, appalled. "Did I just call Donna's mum _my_ mum?"

"Yeah, you kinda did."

"Oh God. I really _must_ be becoming infirm in my old age. Pretty soon you'll have to put in me in a rest home." But he doesn't seem too perturbed by the thought, instead just threads in another daisy to the ever growing chain in his hands.

It was interesting, Melody thinks, observing him. She hasn't ever really seen the Donna side to him before, other than his absurd interest in clothing. Although that may have just been the eleventh version of his future self unexpectedly peeking through the folds of John's forced metacrisis regeneration. You can never be too sure about that type of thing. Although she really hasn't had much of an opportunity to see much of any side of him, Melody realizes with a start. It's really only been four days.

John's looking at her, expectant. When she looks at him, puzzled, he asks in a breathless sort of way, "You were zoning out for a moment there, the way you do, and I thought that maybe she was . . ."

It takes Melody a moment. "Oh," she says, realization dawning. "No. Braveheart wasn't . . . and I'm sorry, I'm not really sure how to contact her, she's always been the one to contact to me. I'm not even sure how she's able to do it, really. Must be my connection with Sexy."

John flushes at that, splutters, "I really don't know what he was thinking, calling her _sexy_ like that. _I _certainly never did. _Honestly."_

"Well you were an older man when you were younger. It probably didn't even occur to you until you became younger yourself. And you have to admit—she _is_ pretty sexy. "

"Oh, shut up. Here." He plops the finished daisy-dandelion chain on her head. It slips down over her eyes, crooked; Melody straightens it, laughing.

"Well?" she asks. "How do I look?"

"Like a child."

"I revel in my childhood, thank you very much."

"Uh-huh." Then: "What does she say? About me?"

He looks so anxious, and for some reason all Melody can think is how amazing it is that he's had such a bad day as this, almost getting killed twice over, and he's still able to make daisy chains.

Melody says, "Well, she thinks you're pretty amazing, for starters. The first thing she ever told me was 'Goodbye', and the very second thing was that her John was coming for Melody Williams . . ."

* * *

She doesn't tell him about his son.

He doesn't tell her about seeing her die.

And for the moment, they're both happy.


	12. fire girl

**A/N: For those of you who read the drabble series, there are some major changes in this chapter. Thank you to everyone for your kind reviews! ~madis**

* * *

Inside of the package, there are two things: a handwritten note and an Alpha Meson pistol. John confiscates the pistol for "testing" to make sure it isn't booby-trapped, while Melody reads the note aloud. Ian's handwriting is surprisingly hard to read (it's written in this strange, backdraft uphand slanted scrawl that's unmistakable), but she's able to make it out eventually:

_Dear Mels,_

_I know John doesn't approve of guns, but this is a necessity. And don't worry—he'll have to give it back to you eventually. The gun you should recognize; River uses it often enough. Just in case you don't, it's an Alpha Meson pistol. A handy right hand to have by you in a pinch. You told me to tell you to use the pistol when you go to a restaurant. You also said it'd be pretty obvious, and don't forget to set it on stun. Wouldn't want anyone getting killed; John'd have my head._

_Love, Ian_

* * *

All's quiet in the TARDIS. The wheezing bellow of the ship as it suspends them in space is a pleasing counterpoint to John humming, which floats up from below the console floor like a raggedy, off-pitch ghost tune. John is suspended in the swing underneath the console, wire tangling down around him. One of his feet is on the floor, pushing him back and forth in a lazy round arch. He'd found a pair of circular, wire rimmed glasses (the kind more apt for Harry Potter or John Lennon) on his dresser table that morning; they now perch on the bridge of his nose, looking completely daft. He's peering down through them at Jack's old vortex manipulator, sonic in the other hand.

A shaft of sparks erupt from the manipulator; with yell, John drops both manipulator and sonic and nearly topples of the swing. A laugh reveals that he is not alone. Melody is leaning over the stair railing of the stairs leading down to the odd quasi-workshop/meeting area, grinning at him. "Hey, stupid face," she says, her hair dangling about her face, "what in the world are you doing?"

She's become happy, in the past week. He remembers that small, still form lying huddled on the hospital cot in a pool of her own blood, having to restart her heart because he refused to let her die, and finds it hard to reconcile that image with the vibrant woman standing before him now.

He swings forward, picking up the sonic and the manipulator off of the floor. Frowning, he sets the manipulator in his lap and gives the sonic a shake, slapping it in his hand when all it does is fizz pitifully. "Did you break _another_ one?" she laughs at him, coming down the rest of the stairs.

"Shut up," he counters, automatic. "I didn't break another one; in fact, this is the first one that's been broken, for your information."

"But you said Braveheart gave you five of them in that drawer upstairs. So it stands to reason that—"

"Oi! Shut. Up," he says. She laughs at him, sits down on the bottommost step.

"So it's broken then?"

"Weell, when the primary emitter cluster refuses to light up then yeah, I'd say it's broken."

"'Primary emitter cluster'?"

"The lighty bulb thing on top. Temperamental. Blasted. Thing." With each word he smacks it in his hand.

"It doesn't _normally_ break when you drop it, does it?" she asks. "In fact, I remember them being quite the sturdy tool."

"Yeah, well, these are probably prototypes." He flings it back onto the ground again, where it rolls under some of the cables. "So," he adds, fixing Melody with an expectant expression, "what can I do you for, Miss Williams?"

"Just . . . wondering what you're doing."

"Oh. Weell, just working on clearing out the storage space of Jack's old manipulator. DNA, memory data—the Time Agency's a paranoid lot, manipulators are much harder to destroy than people are—and we don't want anybody able to make a second Jack or anything, because that would be bad. And you never know: having a manipulator might come in handy."

"It might, that."

She hesitates, before adding, all in a blurted rush, "John: it's been a week since we ran into Jack. Um, do you think that it's—"

"No."

She huffs in exasperation. "Come _on, _John. If Ian had set a booby-trap on the gun it would have gone off by now."

Defensive, he pulls himself towards her, using his feet to propel him forward. The swing is designed so that it's able to move about the cables of the TARDIS easily enough, so long as you were able to push yourself along. "Melody, we don't know that. We don't know. I've run into thousands of booby-traps in my time, and they've all been frightfully messy. There was this one time with a Bunsen burner and a squirrel the size of a wolf and—"

She purses her lips at him. "You just don't want me to have the gun."

He throws his hands up in the air. "Of course I don't want you to have a gun! They're dangerous and—and—"

"Ian said say I'd need it in the future; it's why he gave it to me, remember? And we wouldn't want to create a paradox."

Cursing paradoxes, John snaps, "Fine. After we've stopped for groceries I'll run a few more diagnostic checks on it—then we'll see."

"Groceries?"

"We've ran out of milk."

Melody agrees to the "diagnostic checks," albeit reluctantly. She knows it's a bit silly of her, but John's refusal to give her the gun almost seems like he's refusing to trust her And she knows, she knows he does trust her,that he's only keeping the gun because he doesn't trust _Ian, _not her, but he should also know by now that she wouldn't shoot anyone without cause.

Glancing at him sidelong, she quips, "You know, you let _River_ have a gun."

He rolls his eyes at her. "You are very aggravating, you know that?" His brogue mangles the word "aggravating."

"Don't be rude, John."

* * *

"You're Mrs. Noble."

"What?" Melody looks up, peering through the dust and the sunbeams spilling through the cracks in the floor above their heads. The roar of the crowd is like a motorbike growling down the street, but angrier, alive. Thirsty. Most people are going out of their way to not look at one another. Melody shivers; they'll be taking them up any second now. She hadn't been sure what to expect for their first adventure after Jack, Ian, and the hospital, but accidently stumbling upon an illegal slave trade, getting caught and separated from John in the process, and being sold into the annual gladiatorial competition wasn't one of them.

The people around her are dull, listless. The sour, stale stink of unwashed bodies permeates the holding pen, and there are long rust colored streaks on the walls. Melody's pretty sure it's dried blood.

"You're Mrs. Noble," the voice says again. There's a slight movement in the far corner, and out from the dazed, huddled mass of humanity and stench steps a small, slight figure with grease and dirt smearing his dark-skinned face. It's a boy, maybe sixteen or seventeen. There are dark circles under his eyes. He makes his way towards Melody, sits down beside her on the bench.

"Jarn, son of Tamush and Karo," he says, taking Melody's hand and bowing over it, his other hand making a strange gesture over the back of her hand, his fingers bunching up.

Melody's throat constricts, at the thought of manners in such a place as this, and it takes her moment to say, "I'm Melody. Melody Williams. Of, um, daughter of Rory and Amelia Pond. Why do you—why do you call me Mrs. Noble? That's not my name."

"That is the title he told my people to call you, should we ever find you. Mrs. Noble, with the hair the color of flame. As soon as I saw you I knew it had to be you. The lady who would end the thieving of bodies."

"Oh. Thieving?"

"The Darkolls stealing our life from us, Mrs. Noble. It is all they do." Vaguely, Melody remembers John jabbering away about the people groups in this place. The Darkolls were a militaristic people, very much like Rome, who had come over from their home planet to enslave, destroy, and otherwise rule the less technologically advanced Injal? Aljal? She supposes that Jarn must be one of the Injal/Aljal.

"And you think I'm this . . ."

"You're the one who's supposed to bring down the vakgal, catching the fire that will spread and spread. Girl with the hair of fire. And we'll win." He says this simply, as if it were fact.

"Stop with your nonsense, you threkling youth! Everyone knows that Mrs. Noble is a story from long ago!" a man across the cramped box barks, his yellow eyes sunken in his dirt smeared face.; underneath the dirt he'd be pale. Looking at him, Melody can't help but think of those black and white pictures of miners, with their ears poking out from underneath their caps and their grins white behind their coal smeared faces, mining picks over their shoulders, the Ozarks a pale smudged grey against the grey sky. She'd taken a class about American history once, and it stayed with her.

Jarn flushes. "Why can't it be her?" someone else calls from the press of bodies. "We're all going to die anyway—allow us a little hope before we snuff it." Someone else comes up beside Melody and glares at the man. It's a cheerful faced woman who spoke, with wildly curly hair; she places a hand on Melody's shoulder and gives her a sympathetic pat. "Don't mind him," she adds, as he turns away with a snort. "You've just come in with the last shipment—you still have some life left in you. Some of us've been here for days, waiting to die. And it's a hard thing, hope."

"So you think I'm this Mrs. Noble too, then?" Melody asks.

"Why not? You certainly look the part." She wedges her way in beside Melody, shakes her hand. "The name's Doctor. Doctor Norma Jones. All my friends call me Noh."

"Um. Melody."

"Jarn, son of Tamush and Karo," Jarn says.

"Nice to meetcha Jarn. You came in yesterday, right?"

"Yes. That is when I was stolen."Jarn stares at Melody as if she were the best thing since the sun.

Flushing, Melody says, "And who gave your people this story? Does anything tell of that?"

"Well," Jarn says, "they say a man appeared one day in a boom of thunder. He was a god, come from the sky. He told us that one day we would be hard pressed, and when everything seemed darkest a flame would appear, a girl with red hair, and she'd catch the whole world on fire."

That seemed sort of a bad thing to Melody, catching the whole world on fire, but she didn't dare say that to Jarn, whose whole face was alight. Doctor Jones murmurs in Melody's ear, "The boom of thunder would be the vortex manipulator. Sounds like somebody's got an admirer, if he's been telling everyone you're their savior. Dearie, who do you know who has a vortex manipulator?"

Melody looks at the older woman, startled. The only person she can think of is Ian, because Jack's dead and River's in another universe. All she says, though, is, "You know about vortex manipulators?"

Doctor Jones laughs. "Of course," she says. "And I think it's a fine thing, to have hope. Stick to it, Jarn. Melody can be Mrs. Noble just as well as anyone. It's the choices that really matter in the end."

Melody stares at her, halfway towards appalled. Catching her eye, Doctor Jones leans in to whisper, "He's more than likely to be dead in a minute, anyway. We all are. Nobody really seems to manage to make it out of the arena alive."

"You're not frightened," Melody observes. There's a high flush to the other woman's cheeks, and her eyes sparkle with life. She looks almost excited.

"No," Doctor Jones says. "I'm not. Besides, I've met a future of version of myself a long time ago who was quite a bit older than I am now. So I'm coming away from this pretty optimistic."

"Time can be rewritten," Melody observes, thinking of a skinny man in a pinstriped suit who tried desperately to change the whole wide world by himself.

"Nah. Not those times. It was a fixed point. You can't really dodge fixed points."

Melody decides to switch from appalled to shocked. "Who _are_ you? You know about fixed points?" she hisses, painfully aware of Jarn standing _right there_ looking at them both with interest. Because the echoes are just too painfully obvious to ignore.

_Time can be rewritten!_

_Not those times! Not one line, don't you **dare.**_

Doctor Jones grins at her. "Of course I know about fixed points. I'm an archaeologist."

There's a sudden rush of movement at the front, and a murmuring swell ripples through the crowd. The swell breaks over the three huddled together in the corner, and Melody realizes that it's compromised solely of the hot stink of panic. There's a press of bodies _back_ into the corner; Melody is swept along with them, and would have been separated from the other two if Doctor Jones hadn't grabbed hold both of their upper arms. The whole room gives a shuddering jerk, and there's a low rusty clank-pull-whizz of machinery. The room gives another jerk, and the crowd groans along with the machine as the room begins to rise upwards.

Doctor Jones is speaking, very low and very fast, pitched for their ears alone. "You two stay close to me. We might have a shot at this if we stick together. As soon as I tell you to, you both run. Okay? Don't stop. Don't look back. Just run, and follow me." Jarn's nodding, his face pale. "Melody?" Doctor Jones presses, giving her a little shake. Melody's frozen, eyes wide; she meets the doctor's eyes and gives a jerky nod. It's the most she can manage.

The sun hits them, bright, blinding. The man who had scorned them from before has been pressed up next to them by the crowd; Melody can smell the sourness of him. He's swearing, slowly and steadily, barely pausing for breath. For one moment he and Melody make eye contact, and he swears directly at her and gives a tight little nod. She's aware of her own heartbeat, loud in her ears, and of her breathing, and of Jarn hyperventilating beside her and the steady bulk of Doctor Jones behind them both.

The roar of the crowd, loud underground, hits them, and it's a deafening wall of sound, impossible to think through. There's a loud, scarping _bzzrt_ as somewhere the alarm goes off; Melody realizes that they had been kept in some sort of cage, the gridded chain link finally visible in the light. And at the alarm, the chain link around them comes alive with electricity, crackling along people's bones. There's a scream, and a sudden rush for the exit. Doctor Jones gives both Melody and Jarn a push, propelling them forward. She stays with them, as the sea of people spills forth from the cage.

The ground crunches under Melody's boots. _It's sand_, she realizes, dazed, looking down at it. _It's sand. They used sand in Rome, to soak up the blood. _Someone jostles her, breaking her out of her stunned reverie; she spins around, her balance broken. Doctor Jones is there, catching her, pushing her forward again. "Run!" she commands her, yelling over the horror of it all. "Run, damn you! Don't just _stand _there! _Run!"_

And Melody runs.


	13. it's a deathtrap of death

The roar of the crowd is hungry, the glare of the noonday sun a harsh, blinding white, rising off of the sand. The arena is large, about three football fields in length; the crowd of people are huddled on one end of it. Platforms rise out of the sand at irregular intervals, flat black monoliths rising up towards the sky. And above it all are tiers upon tiers of seats filled with spectators. Giant screens crown the seats, flashing what's happening on the ground below to the people in the crowd too far away to see. They block out the sky. Melody catches all of this in a glance, as she and Jarn run after Doctor Jones, who is running towards the closest platform, which is about twenty feet away. The sand drags at Melody's feet as she races after Doctor Jones; she's exhausted before they ever reach the platform.

Doctor Jones slides to a halt in front of the platform, a cloud of dust rising around her, Melody and Jarn just a step behind. Now that she has the time to notice, Melody recognizes with a start her own face looking back at her from the screens, looking equally startled, with a long scratch down one cheek. She hadn't been kidnapped quietly; one of the men had hit her.

The platform rises about five feet above their heads. Half jumping, half sliding on the slick surface of it, Doctor Jones is able to catch her upper body on the upper edge of the platform and scramble up, her boots gripping enough on the platform's side to gain leverage to help her assent. Once she's secured safely on top, she helps up Melody, and then together they haul up Jarn.

"We have two minutes," she says. There's a pile of weapons in the center of the platform; she moves towards it, picks up a knife, flips it and catches it, hilt first, her expression fierce. Her reflection in the platform's surface does the same. "Arm yourselves."

Melody and Jarn hasten to do what she says, scrambling over to the pile of weapons. There's not much to choose from: a few short swords, all dull; some knives, equally dull, one lying in completely shattered pieces across the platform; a shield too dented to be of much use to anybody; an equally dented helmet; a bow and a few arrows, some of which are only the shafts; a spear in surprisingly good condition, which Jarn picks up, testing its weight. With a small nod he keeps it by his side as he continues to root through the pile.

Ignoring the multiple images of herself looking around the pile in dismay, Melody says, "Why even bother? Why give us weapons if they're hardly of any use to anybody at all?"

Doctor Jones says, "They don't care, not really." The flickering images of Melody are being replaced by a countdown from a hundred. They watch, grim. Meody's heart slams in her chest. She's scared.

"I expect they're probably gloating across the audio-forms right now how they've caught the Girl with the hair of flame," Doctor Jones adds. "This planet—it doesn't have very many redheads."

"But I'm not," Melody says, "but I'm not her. The chosen one. I'm not. I'm from Leadworth."

"Yes, but they think you are. And faith is a powerful thing." The countdown's reached seventy, now. Doctor Jones places a knife in Melody's hand; she curls her fingers around it, closing in. Very few people have moved from the relative safety of the group at the arena entrance to go to the platforms. The man who had grumped at them earlier in the holding pen is a few platforms away, helping up a woman whose long hair was in the was in a brown plait down her back.

"What're we facing, Doc-tar Jones?" Jarn asks, his accent mangling the word a bit, his voice high pitched with anxiety. He circles around to them, having found along with the spear a knife, which he clutches in his other hand. "It changes every time—we never know."

Doctor Jones says, "In ancient Rome, they used to feed people to the lions—um, that'd be thraktall for you, Jarn. I suspect we're dinner, that the real gladiatorial games will start after."

"But what are they?" Melody asks, her voice cracking in her panic. The countdown's reached thirty, now. They move closer together, until they're all back to back in a slightly lopsided triangle. "What kinds of lions are we facing?"

"I don't know. I don't know. But be ready." The countdown reaches twenty, and the audio crackles to life in a pleasant female voice, counting down with the flashing numbers on the screen.

"Twenty. Nineteen. Eighteen. Seventeen."

Melody swallows, shifts a bit closer to the other two.

"Sixteen. Fifteen. Fourteen. Thirteen."

The handle of the knife slides in her palm, her sweat making the leather grip slippery.

"Twelve. Eleven. Ten."

Her mouth is dry. She wishes the Doctor were here.

"Nine."

If he were here, he'd have already stopped this, already gotten out of here and started a revolution, instead of getting captured like an idiot.

"Eight."

_Well, no, that's a lie,_ she amends._ He'd have gotten captured. Daft man._

"Seven."

Beside her, Jarn is praying, a strange language the TARDIS isn't translating, too low and fast for her to follow even if Braveheart had been.

"Six."

A few more people have begun to make out for the platforms, the countdown galvanizing them into panic, running in short, scattered bursts.

"Five."

None of them try and fight for a place at the already taken platforms. They pass by their platform, running hard, flat out, silent as ghosts against the countdown.

"Four."

Melody and Jarn exchange glances. He gives her a small little nod, and almost smiles. "Fire for hair," he whispers.

"Three."

On Melody's other side, Doctor Jones is intense, silent, scanning the arena, poised for action.

"Two."

Abruptly, in a sick wave of panic, Melody wishes John were here. He'd know what to do.

"One."

The soldier who takes care of her hands.

* * *

It starts with a flash of light, deep in the heart of the platform. A slow haze stirring lazy and golden under their reflections. The gold pulses out into a sickly yellow in one sharp burst, knocking over all of their reflections. Melody skids away from the light, topples over the edge of the platform. She lands on her back in the sand; the platform rises above her, a black mirror that she looks back at herself from, scared.

Choking on lack of air, she lies on her back winded. There's that split second moment of feeling like a fish dying, and then with a gasp Melody rolls over onto her hands and knees. She scrabbles for her knife, which she'd dropped in her fall. She grabs both the hilt and a large amount of sand, which seeps from the cracks in her fingers. Behind her she's aware of noise, a harsh screaming like the edge of ripped paper, and in the sand shadows dance to death. Eyes widening, Melody turns, looks up past the glare of the sun to see two silhouettes on the platform, and they're dancing the same as their shadows, fast and sharp.

Doctor Jones's knife flashes in the sun again, again, like the winking of a coin, and the silhouette of Jarn's spear stabs at her, testing out her weak points. He's lurching, not properly fighting at all, inarticulate screams of animalistic fury ripping from him; Doctor Jones, in contrast, is poised, backing up, backing up, circling him, avoiding ripping him with her knife as well as avoiding him ripping her up with his spear.

Melody scrambles to her feet. Doctor Jones suddenly slips down the shaft of Jarn's spear, catching his other arm which is welding the knife with her hand, and clocks him one on the side of the head with the butt of her knife. He goes down. Melody stares, wide eyed.

Doctor Jones turns towards her, hops down from the platform. Melody scrambles away from her, gulping. She finds her voice somewhere between the first and second step.

"What did you—stay away from me!" she commands, trying to pass as menacing. But Doctor Jones ignores all that.

"Are you affected? Are you alright?" she asks, grabbing Melody by the shoulders.

"A-Alright? What are you talking about?" Melody demands.

"The pulse—it was a transmitter of some sort," Doctor Jones explains. "I've seen it once before, on Skaro; it dampens anything in the mind but the primal instincts, causes everyone to view everything else as a threat, something to be eliminated at all costs. I didn't realize what it was till it was too late. I would have never brought us to the platform otherwise."

"Hang on, hang on. What are you saying? That our enemies, our lions—they're—"

"Us. Our lions are us. Jarn never stood a chance. We might be the only too with our higher intelligence still intact." She pulls Melody over into the shadow of the platform; kneeling, she puts her knife into her boot, picks up a short sword that had fallen off from the blast.

Melody kneels next to her, feeling lost. "Why weren't you affected?" she says.

Doctor Jones grins at her. "Why weren't you, eh, Melody? I'm an archaeologist, you're a time traveler. Together I'm pretty sure we've developed a few mental safe holds of our own."

Melody stares at her. How did Doctor Jones know that she was a time traveler? Was there some sort of—some sort of visible _sign_ or something, some telltale mark?

"How do you know that I'm a—"

"Time traveler?" Doctor Jones says "Oh come on. You don't expect a girl to share all her secrets, do you?"

The old man who'd reminded Melody of a miner barrels around the corner of the platform. A hole in his side drenches his shirt in blood. As soon as he sees them he lets out a feral snarl and lunges. He has no weapon, instead using his bare hands and fingernails to scratch. He knocks into Melody and Doctor Jones, tumbling them over end on end. Doctor Jones drops her short sword; somehow Melody is able to keep hold of her knife, but his elbow slams into Melody's eye. She sees stars.

**_CRACK_**_._

Abruptly the man falls limp. Melody clears the solar system from her eyes to see Doctor Jones, face white, gently lower the man to the ground; his head is in her hands, his neck at an unnatural angle.

"Oh God." Melody turns away, feeling sick. The whole side of her face where his elbow had slammed into her throbs.

"Once you've been reduced to such a state, there's no coming back from that," Doctor Jones says. She speaks calmly, as though reciting from a textbook. Her eyes are large, dark wideness in the bloodlessness of her face. "Similar to Reavers in that respect, although far less . . . violent. It was a mercy. And there's bound to be more coming."

"S-So the old man—Jarn—all of them. They're—?"

"Yes. All of them." Her lip is split; a thin rivulet of blood runs down her chin. She wipes at it, adds, "Jarn should have been at home with his family. He was only a boy."

"Doctor Jones—" Melody begins, unsure of what to say.

"Noh."

"What?"

"My name. Remember? Short for Norma; my parents were cruel people." She smirks at that, wipes her palms on her thighs, trying to rid them of death. "It's best if we keep moving, stick to the outer edges of the arena." She picks up her sword. "Hopefully everyone will kill everyone else, leave us alone. Then we can try and find a way out of here. I'm a bit amazed more haven't found us by now; I suspect it's because we're so close to the entrance of the arena. Most people would have fanned out further by now; at least I did something right."

"I've never killed anyone before," Melody says.

"Yeah. Hopefully you won't have—" Noh breaks off abruptly, swears. Melody sees herself on every screen, staring wide-eyed at herself, the side of her face already bruising over, and her red, red hair, burning bright against the white of the sand.

* * *

They'd been able to hide behind a platform shelved in one of the arena corners before the camera (and three of the "lions") found them again. "Someone," Noh announces, knocking back one of them with the winking edge of her sword, "is trying very hard to get you killed."

"You think?" Melody screeches back. This would all have been so much easier if John had let her have the gun, she thinks sourly, although they probably wouldn't have let her keep it anyway. She'd been searched upon arrival at the cage.

They're backed into the side of the platform; Melody ducks as one of the victims slops a punch in the general direction of her head. They weren't necessarily fast, but they are unrelenting, and Melody and Noh were tired. Plus, Melody isn't very good at fighting; Noh had been reduced to a whirl of kicks and the slashing combination of her sword and knife, which, while dull, served the purpose of driving the victims back.

There is a moment when it seems as if they're winning. Melody actually manages to get one in position for Noh to knock out, and the other one's dead, with Noh's knife buried dull in her heart, and the last one, a thin, tall man, trips over his feet, goes down. But he's too close to Noh, and he plows into her; they fall together hard onto the ground, a jangle of legs and arms and the single point of Noh's sword as it falls away from her. Her head cracks into the platform, a low wet sound, and she falls limp. A smear of blood follows after her as she slides down the side of the platform, the man's weight bearing down on her, pressing her into the sand, his fingers bruising her airways as he strangles her.

And it's automatic, running towards her, towards Noh, heart in your mouth. But before you can take more than a step, you appear next to them in a crack of thunder, cricket bat in hand, and thwack the man over the head. He falls; you look at yourself, looking at you.

As if the day couldn't get any weirder.


	14. melody in the future perfect

"Help me move her," other Melody commands. Dropping the cricket bat, she picks Noh up at the shoulders, hands under Noh's arms. Melody moves to pick up her feet, and together they're able to get Noh into the little shade that the platform provided.

"You should have a five minute reprieve, if I remember correctly," other Melody says, going back and picking up the cricket bat. "Most of them are busy on the other side of the arena, killing one another off. And they can't have the camera trained on us all the time; that's why I picked this moment to come. Knew they wouldn't be paying attention."

Melody studies her as she moves back into the shade. She has her hair in a long braid; there's a vortex manipulator strapped to her left wrist, with a single black hash mark on the inside of her arm, just above the manipulator; there's a black permanent marker around her neck, capped. She looks tired.

_What have I done (will do) that I look so tired?_ She remembers John telling her about meeting up with future her and the Doctor, both of them in the future perfect while he was bound out by the past, by things he-couldn't-yet-know, by spoilers. Of the forget-me-not creatures that the TARDIS could never remember to show her in the Doctor's dreams, that John couldn't remember enough to describe, only that they were (are) _there, _somehow, someway, in their universe. Hers and John's.

"Is she alright?" Melody demands, kneeling in a cloud of dust next to Noh. "She's going to be alright?" She looks to pale, so lifeless, lying there, a small pool of her blood congealing the sand around her . . . by the time common sense catches up to Melody's battle shocked brain that something really should be done about the wound in question, she is already handing herself a handkerchief. She's put the cricket bat beside her on the ground; Melody eyes it warily. Plowing people in with cricket bats definitely does not seem like the best of time to be had.

"Apply pressure to Noh's head wound," she advises herself kindly. "Noh's going to be fine. Better than fine—fantastic even." Applying the handkerchief to Noh's head, Melody catches the joke, smiles wanly at herself.

"Fantastic—it is such a very good word, isn't it?"

"Mm."

"How far out are you? Unless that's—"

"Spoilers? No. I remember myself telling you. So, no. I'm out by about . . ." She ticks off on her fingers. "A year? Year and a half? Time is so fluid when you're inside the TARDIS."

"Why aren't we with John?" The question sparks out of her like an exploding star. "He mentioned why the Doctor is there—here—about the cracks in the universe. I understand about that. But why was John not there? Why was there only a future version of me?"

"Do I really have to say it?"

"No. River says it often enough for the both of us."

"Yeah." Melody watches her watching herself. Her mouth is set into a grim, neat little line; there are whole entire trunks underneath her eyes, not just suitcases. Definitely tired; John had been tactful when he'd mentioned how exhausted she will look.

"So that's a relief," she adds, as if they had been in a moment's conversation instead of a moment's silence. "That I succeed in snagging him out from Jack."

"Yeah. Remember, though—he told you to come in swinging."

Melody gives herself an odd look. "He did?"

"Didn't he?"

"Well I suppose he just did, albeit indirectly."

"Yeah." A grin quirks both of their lips simultaneously. "Timey-wimey issues," Melody guesses.

Her future self replies wryly, "Oh, you don't even know the half of it."

"I suppose I will though."

"I have. And besides braining people with cricket bats, I have been—well, I've been informed by a very reliable source—namely my memories—that I have to tell you that John's coming. Now. To get you guys. Almost right after I leave, in fact."

"Of course he's coming." The rejoinder is automatic; it hadn't even occurred to Melody that John _wasn't_ coming. Of course he'd come for her.

"Is John your boyfrein' then?" Noh slurs between them. "Sounds like quite the lovely bloke, if he's coming to fetch us."

"No!" other Melody yelps. "No, he's not!"

"No, he's really, really not," Melody adds in agreement.

"Uh-huh." She didn't sound as if she believed them. She props herself on her elbows, waving away both Melody's attempts of help as she scoots back to prop herself up on the platform behind them. Taking the cloth from Melody, she applies it to the back of her head, wincing.

She laughs at the look of concern on Melody's faces. "Calm your feathers; I've had worse. Besides, you," here she points at the future Melody, "shouldn't be so worried. Unless I don't make it out of here alive."

"No, you live," other Melody says. "I just don't like seeing my friends hurt."

"Eh, see that?" Noh says, nudging Melody with the arm currently not occupied with staunching her head wound. "We're friends. And I have a concussion."

"Of course you have a concussion," Melody says, feeling a bit cross. "And of course you're my friend. There's nothing like a battle to the death to become friends with someone."

The vortex manipulator on other Melody's wrist beeps. "Oops," she exclaims, picking up the cricket bat. "Only have a minute before the Doctor pulls me back. Me, tell John to stop being stupid and just give me the stupid gun already. We'll be need—" She blinks out of sight in a crack of electricity.

"Well," Noh exclaims, "does that happen often? Your future self popping up with a cricket bat in tow?"

"Recently? Yes."

Noh takes the handkerchief away from her head, frowns at the blood staining the fabric. There are little question marks on the corners; she raises her eyebrows at them as she reapplies pressure to her wound.

"Question marks?" she asks.

"The Doctor likes them better than full stops. Well he did four faces ago, and I suppose he just never got around to changing them out."

"Charming. You'll have to tell me more about this Doctor friend of yours." Slowly, dizzily, she gets to her feet. Melody grabs her arm when she sways dangerously to one side. "Thanks," Noh says. "Hand me my sword, will you?"

Melody does so. "Are you sure you'll be alright?" she asks.

"Somebody needs to defend us until your boyfriend gets here, and no offense, Melody, but cricket bats notwithstanding, you're an absolute rubbish fighter. I should be fine so long as I have the platform to back me up."

"He's _not_ my—"

"Yeah yeah. We have about a minute more, if my guess is correct. And oh look, they have you up on the screen again. How lovely."

* * *

Inside the central vector, the orderlies are in a state of panic. One by one, their stations for the other arenas are losing view counts. Orderly Fifty-three is in the worst panic of all of them; it is his station, after all, which is receiving all the viewers. More and more viewers are tuning into the holo-vids to see _her; _he knows that it can't be anyone but her, either. He's the heard the prophecy as well as anyone. He doesn't know what to do. He's tried to kill her, but somehow she keeps on _surviving._

Come to that, how in the world are she and that other woman even cognizant?

But the orders had been clear: keep her up on the screen as much as possible. And it is not his place to question orders, even if they make him feel as if he's beginning to molt at any second. At the rate he's going he'll be bald as a chickling by Farllal Day.

In _his_ opinion the girl should be killed; it'd save him from the stress. He might even have some feathers left. She fit the prophecy; keeping her alive for any length of time only heightened the rebellion's cause. "_Threking _Injall scum and Darkoll blood-traitors," he mutters under his breath, scowling. In his opinion they all should—well _hel-_lo_. _What is _this?_ Broken out of his thoughts, he leans in closer to the screen, as if that will help him see any better, the brightly-colored crest on top of his head rising in excitement as he makes out the letters on the side of the materializing box.

He patches into the comm. The Director's voice, tired, crystallizes through the feed. "Orderly Fifty-three," she recognizes.

"Permission to speak ."

"Granted."

"I can't be sure, but I think—I think it's what you told me to look out for, Director. A bright red box has just materialized in Arena Fifty-three."

There's a moment's pause, and then the Director's voice crackles to life in his comm. "Yes, we see it." She sounds very excited. If he wasn't busy with his job, he would have preened with pride; this just might instigate the promotion he's been wrangling for ever since Orderly Fifty-two left his desk open from _his _promotion to Fifty-one's old spot.

"Patch us the audio," the Director adds after another brief pause. "She wants to hear it."

He does with a press of the button. The audio becomes unmated in his com, too; the sound sets his teeth on edge. How in the world can anyone _bear_ to listen to that hideous _vworping_?

* * *

"Is it him?" the Director asks, voice clicking with anxiety. It wouldn't do to displease her; the Game-maker would have the Director's head if the financer of the whole operation was anything less than incandescently happy. "Who you told us to watch for?"

The Director eyes her as she leans in, gaze fixed on the bright red box that's materialized on the sand. "It's him," she confirms, voice no more than a breath of air. She touches the screen with the tips of her fingers, stroking the image of the box. A man steps out of it, peering around him for a moment before spotting the two figures half-sheltered by the platform behind them. He breaks into a run.

Ms. Wolfe's mouth curls into a smile. "Well hello, _Doc_," she purrs. "Did you think you could hide from me forever? How naïve of you."


	15. we speak of ghosts in whispers

**A/N: Long chapter is long. For those of you who followed the drabble series, we get into uncharted territory here. And this is up to what I have written, so instead of updates daily expect one about once a week. Let's go for Tuesday's. ~madis**

* * *

"Melody!" His voice, rough and frantic, carries high over the rising bedlam of the fight; instinctively, Melody turns towards her name and gets smashed for her trouble. She goes down. Her assailant's weight crushes her into the sand; hands hot with sweat clamp down on her throat. She scrabbles desperately, trying to pries them from her throat; she can't _breathe; _then John is there, the sonic brandished like a sword, his face flat as death with anger. The sonic emits a high-pitched wailing electric screech that sends the lions back wheeling and screaming, hands over their ears.

Coughing, struggling to get her breath back, Melody scrambles to her feet. John skids to a stop beside her; one hand reaches out to steady her, the other brandishing a steady pressure with the sonic.

"Melody. You okay?" he says, brisk, flat, scanning the area around them, already backing her away towards the TARDIS.

"I'm fine. John, I'm fine," she says, breaking away from him towards Noh. Noh is crouched in a feral position, her back to the pyramid, knife upraised, eyes bright. Watching the retreating lions, she straightens, but she pitches over halfway through it, falling with one knee in the sand. Melody catches her; her hands are gloved with flecks of dried blood. Noh drops the knife.

"Sorry," she says. "Concussion. Bit wobbly in the knees."

"Well you'll have to be fast enough," John tells her, and then they're running back towards that bright red box, a beacon in the sand.

* * *

They slam the doors shut behind them. Several bodies slam into the outside of the TARDIS, trying to break the doors down, but there's little chance of that happening.

Melody feels curiously light, like jelly. She slides down the doors to the floor, staring around her at the console room. She truly hadn't expected to see it again. Beside her, Noh clings to the hat-stand, an infinity of shoes spilling from the tipped basket. John squeaks along the walkway and up the stairs, smashes into the console, and flings them into the Vortex.

"Don't worry!" he calls down to them. "A few hours in the Vortex will suit Braveheart just fine; get you two cleaned up. Then we head off to the rebellion. Wonderful chaps; Captain Pickardy tells the most delightful puns." He clambers back down the stairs, grinning madly, hair in complete disarray about his head. That's how Melody knows he truly was worried about her; the Doctor only ran his hands through his hair like that when he was agitated over something. "And I'm sorry, Melody," John adds, "but I'm never allowing you out for groceries again. Our first pit stop since Jack, I send you across the street for groceries, and you get yourself kidnapped. It's just not wizard at all."

For all his bravado, though, he's trembling as he pulls her up to bury her in a hug. Braveheart lies warm across the back of her mind, like a cat; not intruding, not saying anything, just simply there. Melody allows herself to fall apart against them both, just for a moment, because she still isn't used to almost dying yet.

Besides, John smells nice.

She listens to the frantic drumming of his single heart, and she wonders: does it hurt him, after having two hearts for so long, to have only one?

His brogue comes out thick, burring warm from his chest, as he says "Don't you ever, ever, _ever_ allow yourself to a) get kidnapped again and b) have prophecies started about you. Prophecies cause nothing but trouble, and they always seem to be filled with nothing but stable time-loops and paradoxes. Prophecies or spoilers. Especially spoilers about death. Either or."

"I'll try not to."

"Good."

They sigh, untangle themselves from one another, turn to find Noh, sitting next to the overturned coat rack on the mountain of shoes, grinning at them. She flaps her hands at them, exclaiming, "No, no, don't you two lovebirds mind me. My knees just got a bit wobbly and I had to sit; concussion, you know. I should be just right as rain so long as I don't fall asleep."

"We're not lovebirds!" Melody protests, going over and helping Noh to her feet.

"Uh-huh. Anyway," directing her attention to John and sticking out her hand, "Doctor Norma Jones. Archaeologist, just so we get that out of the way. And Melody, you didn't tell me your boyfriend was so tall! From a totally objective viewpoint, kind sir, I can see why she's into you."

Melody groans; John, ignoring the look Noh is giving him, takes her hand, says, "Doctor Jones. You kept Melody alive. Thank you." They shake hands.

Noh, amused by his formality, says, "Mhm. What anyone would do. And a bath would be lovely, thank you."

"I didn't mention anything about a bath."

"You were about to."

_My John _was_ about to, _the TARDIS pipes up. _And I've lost the infirmary, so you'll have to make do with First Aid boxes._

_First Aid kits, _Melody corrects absently. Then the rest of the sentence's import catches up with her, and she blanches. _You _lost_ the infirmary? How do you lose an _infirmary_?_

_Very easily, _the TARDIs retorts, stung. _Last I saw it was next to the art gallery, but when I went back to check later on it won't be there. But don't worry; we have the nanogenes, so my John and Melody Williams don't really even need an infirmary._

_Nanogenes? What nanogenes? Like the kind who created that gas-mask child?_

_Oh. Um. Have we not gotten the nanogenes yet?_

_No._

_Oh. Well, never mind then. Forget I said anything. _And, with a certain amount of relish, _Spoilers, Melody Williams. Spoilers. I've never gotten to say that before! Have I? I will have, but had I? I don't remember. Time's just not linear anymore, especially when you're a fifth dimensional concept. Like the wind on a leaf._

* * *

It takes her three lathers with the soap and shampoo before she realizes that the stink of sweat and blood is coming from her clothes in a heap on the floor, and not her. It's slightly difficult, using the soap especially, because of her hands being unable to feel what she's doing, but Melody's in no hurry. She can't move more than a crawl, anyhow; she's already starting to bruise over; her throat feels tight and raw, from where she'd been strangled, and her cuts and scrapes sting clean from the soap, which smells like lavender. Her shampoo smells like vanilla, and is no brand she knows.

_Do you like it? _the TARDIS floats up, questioning. _The smell of vanilla?_

_Oh yes, it's lovely. Thank you._

_I hope you liked it, and you do. Doctor Jones is washing fine in her room I set up for her. She really loves the color of the walls._ Melody had deposited Noh outside of a door marked "Doctor Jones" little over half an hour ago, before she'd gone to her own room. Noh had looked at the nameplate for a moment, smiled wryly, and stumbled in with the express intent to, as she put it, "drown herself in bubble bath." Melody had had to reassure Braveheart that Noh was kidding.

_I still don't think it was a very funny thing to say, _the TARDIS adds now. _Drowning is a serious business, right alongside of keeping Melody Williams inside of me when my John asks me to. And I'm glad you like the smell of your hair product._

The TARDIS falls silent for a moment, drifting but there; Melody can feel her, weighty in the back of her mind, and again she can't help but think of cats, or a song: the strange, warbling tune of a voice. The TARDIS, singing to Melody Williams the only song she knows.

_Braveheart? _Melody asks, leaning

against the side of the shower, the tiles slick under her shoulder. The water pelts down hot and soothing, and she's clean and she smells nice, and despite the aches and scrapes it's almost as if the arena never happened (or so she pretends for the moment).

_Mhm? _

_Why is it when . . . when I was being tortured you spoke to me when I'd never set foot inside the TARDIS, and yet you never do unless I'm inside you now?_

_You're wondering why I didn't tell you my john was coming, why there is a risk of you interacting with a future Melody Williams, because that's dangerous and generally creates Belgium-sized craters in planets and you were going to say that, weren't you?_

_I actually wasn't, but yes, I was wondering why._

_For Melody Williams, she' d already done it in the future, and since I can see, but most of the time I can't explain, I didn't stop Melody Williams from going back and seeing the tiniest bit forward. Besides, Melody Williams forward is with Mummy then, and she's much, much older than I will be always, because she came first. And I don't talk to Melody Williams outside of myself because I can't._

_But you did before?_

_When she was dreaming, when she was asleep. Melody Williams is too high shields for me to speak to her when she's awake unless she's inside—anyone when they're awake has too high shields._

Melody puzzles this out. _Alright . . . but you were talking to Ian. You said you were busy talking to him, when we were all at the hospital. That he helped you feel better._

_Ian Noble is different, _the TARDIS says, and it's a bit like running up against a wall—she just simply refuses to say anything more about the subject. What she does exclaim, though, quite suddenly, as Melody is squeaking clean out of the shower: _Oh good, you like your surprise!_

_My surprise? _Melody questions, wrapping the waiting bright yellow bath towel around herself and side-stepping her huddled mess of clothes on the floor; she'd be back to pick them up later.

_Your surprise, _the TARDIS affirms, her glee spilling over into her voice. _You like them. _

Melody raises her eyebrows. _Them? There's more than one?_

_Weeell, more like a bunch of little ones into one big one, but that's not the point. The point is that you're going to like it._ And she sounds so much like John for a moment that Melody pauses. Children so do try to mimic their parents. Thinking about what John would have to say to _that, _Melody grins.

_You didn't change my room, did you? _she questions, curious. Body aching, she hobbles down the bathroom to the door leading to the bedroom, her bare feet sticking to the floor. Her hair, gleaming red wet, drips along behind her.

_ I did not! _ the TARDIS protests. Melody has to admit that for the TARDIS's sensibilities, she'd kept her word: Melody's rooms had remained relatively unchanged. Her bathroom was small, comfortably so, although the shower tended to switch into a bath when you weren't looking; there was still a door leading into the wardrobe, although, Melody had realized as she'd wandered through the hanging clothes in the past week (all of those empty ghosts of people), it was mostly for costumes, outfits for the past or the future, and none for the present (those types of clothes she found in her closet and dresser drawers, when she'd thought to look for them); the walls of her room were still yellow, her wood furniture was still painted white, everything waiting to be decorated, set up, lived in. And she had.

She'd found a brilliant display of an ocean caught forever in a still photograph, framed among a full of stack of other such photos. She'd hung it above her bed. She'd pilfered books from the library, a huge stack of them, but she hadn't opened any of them, dazed by the fact that she hadn't read a book in—then she'd realized with an abrupt, sickening lurch that she didn't know how long that interim was. She'd put the book down, went and found John, asked him just what, exactly, he was doing with Jack's old vortex manipulator. Fixing it, he'd replied, and then he broke his screwdriver, the daft man. Then he'd suggested they'd stop for groceries, because for some reason the TARDIs absolutely refused to supply food, always had and always will, whether in this universe or the one next door to it, and would Melody be a dear and pop over to the store while he tries to ferret out just where, exactly, the rebellion is hiding, because he's never been one for figuring out currency. And she'd gone, and gotten a cloth smelling of rotted peaches pressed against her nose and mouth for her troubles.

Shaking her head clear of such thoughts, Melody goes into her room. Seeing the clothes neatly laid out on her bed, she manages a smile. _I do love them—they're beautiful._

_And practical, _the TARDIS adds, slightly smug. _I made sure they were practical. _

_Yes, yes, they're tremendously practical, _Melody agrees, and despite her troubled thoughts she can't help but laugh.

* * *

"John?" she asks. "What do you think? Braveheart picked them out for me."

He looks up. He's sitting in the swing underneath the console's floor, tinkering with the vortex manipulator, trying to break down its firewalls with another sonic from the cache of sonics (now down to three) in the console drawer, so he can get into the memory cache and delete Jack. It's quite peaceful underneath the floor, swinging, with his spectacles perched on his nose, fiddling with the manipulator or fixing the TARDIS, even though she tended to spark whenever she thought he was being too uppity.

He's decided he quite likes the swing. He's open but closeted, curled in among the veins of her, quiet except for the gentle hum of her and Melody's calming presence; in the last week she would often come down and sit with him, he on the swing and she on the steps leading down to it, with a pillow underneath her for the glass of the stairs. They pass soft words back and forth between them, sometimes falling silent, allowing the hum of the TARDIS to fill them both. In those times he'd watch her, at her indrawn face, the expressions it made, like ripples in a pond. He knew she was talking to Braveheart, then, and sometimes he'd ask her what they were talking about, join in on the conversation through a third way party, but sometimes he wouldn't, sometimes he'd just watch her when she wasn't looking, pretending to work on the TARDIS or clean out the manipulator.

(He doesn't examine the soft emotion swelling up inside him too closely, only that he likes having her there with him, sitting on the stairs.)

So he looks up, and he grins at her, glad that she's not dead, because she'd almost died today, you know. She comes down the curve of the stairs, and does a little pirouette as she reaches the bottom.

The Donna side of him points out that she's obviously talking about the clothes, you big dumbo. Melody's wearing a loose fitting button-down shirt, vaguely renaissance in style, white in color, and a fitted olive color vest with brass buttons and embroidered with gold swirls. Tan breeches tucked into knee-length high boots and a wide brown belt with an empty gun holster completes the outfit. All in all very nice, very fashionable, vaguely steam-punk: all she'd need was a pocket watch. And because the Donna in him is taking the time to notice, the Doctor part of him does, too, and raises an eyebrow. He catalogues her black eye and the bruises encircling her throat, the scratches on her arms, noticing that her eyes are a little red around the edges, probably from the soap, and the fact that her hair wasn't blow-dried all the way through, so it's still damp on the ends. His companion looks tired; she should rest.

The rest of him, the John part of him, blinks and sits up a little straighter.

"Fine—you look fine!" John blurts out. He adjusts his spectacles, ears pink.

"Braveheart's happy to hear it," Melody says. "For some reason she wanted me to ask you."

"Hmph," he grunts, going back to fiddling with the manipulator. "Well, you look very nice."

"Thanks." Pulling out the pillow from its spot next to the stairs, she sits down.

". . . John?" she adds, her tone thoughtful. Setting the sonic and the manipulator down in his lap, he looks up again. It's apparent by her troubled expression that Melody has something to say, and she'd almost died, so who was he to begrudge her?

"Melody," he says, eyebrows raised. He scoots towards her, the swing squeaking along by the traction in the ceiling.

"We have to help these people. We can't just sit by, do nothing." She closes her eyes, swallows, thinks about Jarn, who couldn't have been more than sixteen. When she was sixteen the most thing she was worried about was memorizing lines for _Twelfth Night. _"They all died. I can't just—we can't just leave them to rot. To—to die for a _sport._" The disgust in her voice is palpable.

John sighs, takes her hands in his. For a moment she doesn't notice, and then her eyes open again and she looks at him. Her hands curl around his own, dry leaves wrapped around a lamppost. "Melody," he tells her, "we're not going to leave them here. I promise."

And she believes him, because he's Doc Foreman, the soldier, and because he's John Noble.

"Yeah," she says. "I believe you."

He smiles at her, and its heart wrenchingly happy, like Christmas. "All right. All right. And I think we can make it work. Toppling a whole entire six-planet wide regime. Because if we win here" he snaps his fingers. "Dominoes falling. Or how it usually sometimes works, anyway. The troupe is committed to see the empire fall and natural rights inserted, good for the common man, etcetera and onwards."

Melody raises her eyebrows at him. "The troupe?" He must mean the rebellion.

"The troupe and I—uh-huh. And I can't really _tell_, not really, I can't see time anymore, not now that my right heart's gone, just enough Time Lord-y sense left to tell when an hour or twenty's passed, but that's not the point, but the rebellion should turn out. It should. And the troupe is really, really committed. Did I mention that already?"

She stares at him for a moment. She'd gathered enough from her dreams to recognize the fact of Time Lord biology that it was the dual hearts were what enabled Gallifreyans to read the byways of time, but she'd just never thought about it before, that John would be missing that, having only one heart. "You can't—?" she whispers, voice dry cracking, but he forces another one of his bright smiles upon her and emphasizes,

"No, no, that doesn't really matter. I've had five years to get used to it. I'm really alright."

But Melody knows that's special Time Lord code for really not alright at all. She wants to ask him, _Does it hurt, having only one heart?_ But he presses on, not giving her time to ask.

"The troupe's really quite remarkable. They've done a lot; don't really even need us. You. You're like the sprinkles on top of the icing on top of their cake. The gasoline to their already well lit fire. I don't really see why that prophecy was made about you at all, flame girl."

"Oh shut it. You're being rude again," she informs him, allowing herself to be distracted from his biological troubles. Now was not the time. "I'm not the girl on anything. I just happen to have red hair and landed in the middle of a rebellion where that's a prophecy. You know, genetics." Even as she says it she doesn't believe herself. Because the crack of thunder would be the vortex manipulator, and who does she know who has a vortex manipulator? (Well, a working one, in any case.)

Blast Ian anyways.

"Melody, you have nice hair. Nothing genetics about it. I've always wanted to be ginger, and it's extremely unfair that you get to be." He frowns at her a moment before adding, "Although it's more of a reddish-gold than a ginger, really. Funny, but I suppose it has."

"Has what?"

"Gotten on without me." Catching her confused look, he hastens to add, "This universe. It's learned to live without a Doctor. I'm glad though—I don't have the time to go around saving everyone. I can only live so long." He hesitates, looks at Melody's waiting expectancy, and thinks, _Hamster._

He closes his eyes, hears himself say, "It's Rose."

"Rose?" She doesn't understand; he can see that as he looks at her, her expression winging away into confusion and panic.

Sighing, he swings their hands between them, gathers himself a few seconds of time, of silence. He hadn't wanted to see it either, of course, hadn't wanted to believe that his Rosie could fund such an operation. But she'd branded her stamp over the whole business. Mrs. Wolfe. She knew the TARDIS, knew him, knew that they would find their way here eventually, ready to help.

_Hello. I'm John Noble and I'm here to help._

That's exactly him. And Rose knew he wouldn't be able to keep away.

All those people, dead over the last century. The troupe had shown him the figures: the Injall, slaughtered for sport, how the Darkoll who protested had been slipped free from their homes and never heard from again. A century of misery and oppression, all because of him. Him and Rose.

_The stuff of legend._

He explains to Melody the facts: how a Mrs. Wolfe had shown up near a century ago, had promised the Darkoll empire funds to expand their regime off world if they'd only hold gladiatorial competitions on every planet; how she never aged, how she always wore a small black armband on her wrist. That she'd told them to be on the lookout for a red box that made this _vworping_ noise. She'd played the noise for them on an audio clip.

"Not Rose." Melody's denial is as automatic as his had been. Because Rose wouldn't do something so terrible. Not that pink and yellow girl. "I mean," Melody adds, "she's done bad things to me, to you, but this . . . this is something else. This is almost genocide. Rose wouldn't commit genocide."

"Melody," he whispers, "she isn't Rose anymore. But I still have to try and save her."

* * *

Because even though she isn't Rose anymore, he still loves her.

Because that's what love is.

* * *

Melody wants to tell him that if Rose doesn't want to be saved he can't force her. That he can't take the whole world on his shoulders, that it's not his burden to bear. But she looks at him, and it's like looking at the sun; she can't say anything at all.

_Melody Williams will just have to be with him when the time comes, _the TARDIS says, her voice dry leaves rattling in the wind_._

_Yes,_ Melody agrees. _I'll just have to be._

Noh's voice, followed by her grinning face, appears over the railing. She peers down at them, her curls a brown halo about her face. "Hey! You two lovebirds done down there? We have a rebellion to go galvanize."

"We're not lovebirds," Melody immediately counters, flushing. She flushes even _more_ when she realizes that she and John are still holding hands. Jerking her hands out of his, she stands, heads up the stairs to Noh. Behind her, John pulls on his jacket, pockets the manipulator and sonic, and follows.

Time to go talk to Rose.


	16. the interim in between

"But first," John exclaims, "we need to stop in a say hello to the troupe." He claps his hands, whirls around the TARDIS, flipping levers and pressing buttons. "Check in, as it were, let them know what the signal is when I go talk to Mrs. Wolfe. Introduce you, Melody," here he bops her on the nose on his second go round the console, finally stopping when he leans on the handbrake, "and they'll be absolutely ecstatic over you, probably have loads of questions for you, probably mostly if you wouldn't mind going around and bolstering moral. Always a good thing, moral bolstering—and you, Doctor Jones. I'm sure you'll be glad to go back to your . . . archaeology." He says the word archaeology the way other people exclaim over gum found on the bottom of their shoe.

Noh is looking much better: newly washed, with a slim blue t-shirt, jeans, and a pair of hiking boots. A jean jacket is knotted around her waist. Melody had asked after her head wound and concussion when she'd clambered up the stairs to the main floor of the console room; Noh replied that the TARDIS gave her some futuristic medicine for both the wound and the concussion. When she'd asked about Melody's bruises and scratches, and hadn't the TARDIS given her something for them, Melody'd merely shrugged. She didn't really want to go into the fact that even if Braveheart had supplied them for her she wouldn't have taken them anyway.

She can live with bumps and bruises. After nearly three? four? five? years drugged into sleep and losing her hands, she isn't too keen to try much of any medicine at all.

"I actually have a date with my husband," Noh replies evenly.

"You have a husband?" John exclaims, and in his surprise he pushes down on the handbrake.

The TARDIS lurches off into the Vortex, sending her occupants sprawling to the floor. It's a wild ride through space, not time because, the TARDIS adds, going through time would take us out of the nexus of events that we're currently strung along, so we'll come out of them when we're done and not before with the events.

The time rotor wheezes up and down in its glass casing, and Melody can feel the TARDIS's excitement thrumming throughout the whole entire ship.

She so dearly loves to fly.

A particularly painful lurch sends Noh and Melody scrambling for handholds. Noh grabs onto the railing; Melody is thrown against the console. The TARDIS's joy flips through her. It's wild and golden as the sea, but purposeful in its direction, in a streamlined fashion out and away through the chaos of atoms and strings, down to the planet below them, around them. It's a curious thing, the displacement of space: for an instant you're somewhere and nowhere at all, ripping through what is probable into what is gravity and air and trees. You trip wire along that faint place between possibilities and dreams, where ideas come from, and then the blue box is materializing on the planet below and you're fact once more.

_I'd shudder apart, dissolve into improbabilities and hearts made out of gold, if I wasn't so well fitted together. Time and space together is even trickier than that, but I'm smart; I can get my John and Melody Williams and the organic beings they bring home safe and sound together._ Braveheart's thoughts stream along, barely half formed words, but her meaning is sure._ Mummy-who-will-come later set me in so I wouldn't grow wild in the jungle of the greenhouse oranges, entangling my John in me organic and flowers. He wouldn't have met Melody Williams otherwise, and then where'd all of us be later?_

Her thought process then dissolves into determination to get her landing exactly perfect.

Another wheezing lurch sends Melody halfway own the console railing. She finds herself jammed against John; the press of his side against hers is warm and butter yellow. He catches her at the shoulders, halting her momentum down to the floor. They laugh at one another, John with a great burst of air, "Ha!", like a dragon; Melody just throws back her heads and laughs, still filled with Braveheart's wild abandoned gaiety.

The TARDIS lands with a bump that shudders down through the coral supports to the floor. John keeps both he and Melody secure with his hold on the console railing, one arm tight around Melody's shoulders. He lets go soon as the TARDIS settles, pulling down on the handbrake to park the TARDIS. Melody pulls down at her waistcoat, notices that in one of the pockets is a black marker pen (the TARDIS must have put it in there when she wasn't looking). Melody frowns, remembering John's explanation of the forget-me-nots, how future her had given him a permanent marker to count them down. She hopes the marker isn't foreshadowing.

Noh rolls her eyes at them both. They really are completely oblivious to one another, which is the most amusing bit about this whole thing. Considering the future (their personal future), in any case, which Noh is.

* * *

_You really need to work on your landings a bit more, dear, _Melody informs the TARDIS.

_Yes, well, it has been perfected eventually. Soon as I find the stabilizers and get Melody Williams to use them when my John isn't looking._

_Oh I will, will I?_

_We haven't gotten that far yet; the concept is still relative._

Letting go of the handbrake, John bounds towards the TARDIS doors. "To the troupe. Bit of a bumpy ride for such a quick stop, but she's still young yet."

"Not that it has anything to do with your driving," Melody teases him. She knows it really isn't his driving, that there's a second set of brakes left on somewhere about the console proper—_And don't forget the stabilizers, _the TARDIs interjects. _Although I will still do the noise. I like that noise. —_but it's amusing to see John getting all flustered.

"Oi! It's not—of course not. My driving has absolutely nothing to do with it. I am an excellent driver."

"Quite."

"Don't be rude, Mel-o-dee." But he's grinning. "Anyway, quick stop, then I'll be off and you, Melody, will be with the troupe inspiring people—"

"Don't be stupid John. I'm coming with you."

"—and Doctor Jones. Really? A date with your husband? I did not see that one coming. What in the _world_ were you doing in that arena getting poked full of holes and general what-you-do if you have a _date?"_

Noh smirks at him. "Archaeology."

"Hmph. Never met an archaeologist I—" He stops with a guilty glance in Melody's direction. "Well, except for River, but I didn't trust River farther than I can throw a shadow, which isn't very far, seeing as they're incorporeal—unless they're a swarm in a suit. A suit full of swarming shadows. Then they're just scary and _not_ the point. To the troupe."

Noh follows him down to the TARDIS doors; Melody pauses on top of the stairs as a thought occurs to her. (A bit of the River in her peeking through.) "You're not going to even check the scanner?" she asks. Normally the TARDIS would be chattering away by this point, right up until John and Melody step outside of her, but she is unusually silent. The last time she'd been this silent had been with Jack, but this one was different. The last had been out of guilt, had been tainted with it when Melody knew where to look.

This one looked to be full of secrets.

_What are you not telling me?_

_It's where you need to be._

"Check the scanner? Why ever for? I know which planet I'm on—what more to know than that? Besides, I plotted in the coordinates for the troupe's headquarters; Commanders Braxtall and Brix probably standing around the TARDIS now, wondering what's taking us so long to come out. Old fusspots. Unless she's mentioned something I should know about?"

"No . . . Braveheart claims it's where we need to be." Shaking off her disquiet, Melody joins John and Noh in front of the doors.

"Good." John grins at her. His spectacles are still perched on the bridge of his nose; his eyebrows above them are two dark brown lines of inquiry. He looks more the part of an owl-mad professor than ever, with the dark blue collar of his coat flipped up and his _Neverwhere _t-shirt.

"John, you look daft," she informs him.

"Thanks for the vote of confidence."

"Anytime_, dear." _

(And for a moment all John can think of is Melody calling him dear in all seriousness, pressing the permanent marker into his hands, kissing him on the cheek as the Doctor looked on. Who will she be to him, in their future?)

Shaking off his own disquiet, John laughs at her. He opens the TARDIS doors to find six guns pointed at his face.


	17. but the moral high ground is mine

**A/N: Hey guys! This is as rough as I get. I'm going to be camping at the beach until Sunday, so I won't be able to reply to any reviews. Despite that, let me know what you think—I love feedback! See you next Tuesday. ~madis**

* * *

"Ahm," John says. His hand dives for the sonic in his coat pocket (his first instinct to fight) but the lead guard raises his gun menacingly and intones "I wouldn't, sir." Not a threat, not yet, but enough of a promise that John raises his hands into the air.

"We are all very much not in the need for shooting people, yeah? I vote on that."

"Search his pockets and get the sonic," the lead guard commands. Alright then, not just the lead guard, but someone important—his head crest is sparked with medals and epaulets. Very high up indeed, if the solar sigil on one of his medals is anything to go by. A colonel, at the very least, or whatever passes for a colonel around here. The Doctor in him takes the time to notice how odd it is that the Darkolls look like the more humanoid, brighter-colored cousins of the Shansheeth, but that's parallel universes for you. Never sure with what you're going to get until you get there. That's the exciting part: a whole new universe to discover.

Two of his men step forward, lowering their weapons. Alright, four now then, six men. One Darkoll has a limp, probably from breaking it in a training mishap—it happened some time ago, he's gotten used to it by now, and it's just enough to be noticeable, not enough to impede him in his work. Even though, still not good. It'd be too risky to try anything..

"She's warned us about you sir," the colonel adds. "Ms. Wolfe was very specific."

_Wizard, _John thinks bitingly. His heart sinks down into his spleen. Any other day he would have been amused, because searching his pockets always resulted in a plethora of miscellaneous gadgetry and what-for. Even this coat, in the short amount of time he's had it (only a week, since his first coat was ruined from the blood of his broken nose), had gathered everything he'd absentmindedly stuck in its pockets.

He's pretty sure there's even a tea pot in there somewhere.

So normally this wouldn't be a problem, but there's the manipulator to think of, which he'd shoved into his left-hand pocket like the dolt he is.

Commandeering a vortex manipulator off a Time Agent is highly illegal in the other universe, and he can only suppose it's illegal in his as well. But that's not the point; he highly doubts that "Ms. Wolfe" cares much for the legality of anything. But if he's learned anything in the last five years, it's that vortex manipulators come in handy for surviving run-ins with Rose. Of course he isn't going to pull a runner _now, _the whole reason he's here is to talk to Rose in the first place, he just arrived a bit early, but later he or Melody might need that vortex manipulator (remembering Melody appear in a crack of thunder to rescue him from Jack, cricket bat in tow).

"Look, just take the whole coat," he blurts out, desperate to try and preserve a time line he can't even see anymore, let alone guess at in stilted hindsight. "My pockets are bigger on the inside; it's really not worth the bother. It really, really isn't."

The guards surrounding him scoff, but their eyes widen as one of the two guards pulls out a canoe paddle. The guard holding the canoe paddle takes one huge step back from John and drops it on the floor.

Oh. That's where that got to.

The colonel's the first to recover. Addressing the other guard tasked with rifling through John's coat pockets, he clacks, "_Klah_ Sill, remove him of his jacket."

_Klah_ Sill doesn't move.

_"Now, Klah."_ The colonel's really good at the not-actually-using-any-threats intimidation, John notes with interest as the Klah rushes to do his superior's bidding, head-crest trembling as he strips John of his coat. He stands there with the coat in his hands, eyeing it as warily as if he were holding a cat.

"Oi! Be careful with that," John informs him. "I like that coat. Braveheart gave me that coat."

The colonel steps forward, gun now pointed right at John's heart. "Now, sir—where's the girl?"

All of this had taken no more than two minutes and thirty-five seconds. Thankfully, Melody and Noh hadn't blathered out after him and gotten guns pointed at their heads for the trouble; they were more than likely right on the other side of the half-open door, listening to all the trouble. The guns pointed at him kept him from darting back into the TARDIS and taking off again. He'd have stayed, if it hadn't been for Melody and Noh. He's standing in front of the half-open doors, blocking the opening so they can't actually see inside the TARDIS proper; he'd been gauging the situation, trying to figure out when he could shut the TARDIS doors behind him. Braveheart would hopefully lock the doors behind him, keep them from following him. Melody could be furious with him later.

All of his wheeling plans ceased, however, when the guard asked him where "the girl" was.

"Ahm," John says. His heart sinks from his spleen into his gallbladder. He goes to straighten the lapels of his coat jacket, remembers that he's not wearing his coat anymore, and awkwardly drops his hands back down to his sides. "Ahm, you mean the one's I rescued from the arena? Those girls?"

"The red-headed female, yes."

So Melody then.

_Wizard._

"Dropped her off at HQ already." He looks the colonel right in the eye. Calm, cool, unflappable. They mustn't know you're lying. "She's absolutely safe, sound, and comfy and you can tell Ms. Wolfe that she isn't going to get a chance to lay a finger on Melody Williams ever again—I personally guarantee that."

The colonel studies John for a moment, eyes narrowed, head-crest flattening in suspicion. In that moment he absurdly resembles a cockatoo.

"I think you're lying," he says.

"Well I think you're bluffing about me lying. So we're even."

"Where. Is. The girl?" With each pause he grinds the barrel of the gun deeper into John's chest. John does his best not to wince.

"Not here," he grinds out.

_Jab. _"And you, sir, are lying. Don't test me." _Jab. _"There is a reason why Ms. Wolfe sent me to collect you." _Jab-jab. _"So don't test me."

"John? We've landed, right—oh, hello." Doctor Jones steps out of the TARDIS doors, closing them behind her, maneuvering around John, smiling brightly at the guns. "I take it we haven't gotten where we were trying to? Glad we left Melody behind then."

John eyes her. What is she doing? "Yes," he says slowly. "Ahm—yes."

"Doctor Norma Jones," she informs the guards. "Archaeologist. Take us to your leader, yes? That is the correct term?"

She's validating his lie. That's what she's doing. She's protecting Melody.

But why? She'd done it in the arena, too; then it'd been what any decent human being should do. But this—this is something else altogether. He can't put his finger on what, but it is.

Who is Norma Jones? And who is she to Melody?

* * *

First River, then Ian, and now Doctor Jones. There have been far too many mysterious people in his life lately.

He supposes that's what makes it exciting.

It doesn't mean, however, that he has to _like_ it.

* * *

_What do you _mean _press the central redux button?_

_The cantalope button next to the root beer tap._

_Um . . . _Melody scans the console frantically. It takes her a minute to realize that "cantaloupe" means green and when the TARDIS mentions a root beer tap, she means a literal one, not a color. Melody presses the green button; the scanner flickers to life, a dull, grainy image of muted color. She fiddles with the dials until the image of a painted screen of brightly-colored birds in flight sharpens on the screen with abrupt clarity. Before she can so much as blink they're past the screen, and she's viewing walls made of wood paneling.

_Melody Williams was very wise to not go outside when Doctor Jones did, _the TARDIS says suddenly. _She can be of much more use with me._

_Yes, well. There hadn't been much I could do, was there? _

Melody had stood just inside the door with Noh, glad she hadn't walked out into the trap and praying fiercely John would get back inside where it's safe. She'd listened to the conversation with John and the head guard with a sinking heart; this was very much not good. With a shock, Melody heard herself mentioned—what did Rose want with _her?_ She still didn't know where the Doctor was any more than she had the last time; that was one thing the TARDIS had never been specific on, probably for this very reason.

Beside her, Noh had scowled, expression fierce, her healed split lip (she'd more than likely used the same medicine on it she'd used for her head wound) a pale white scar crooking her bottom lip. In that moment the older woman reminded Melody inexpressibly of River, which made absolutely no sense at all.

"Stay here," Noh hissed at her, before she stepped out the TARDIS doors, making some blithe comment to defuse the tension and shutting the doors behind her.

Immediately Melody had rushed to the console to try and work the scanner, Braveheart streamlining instructions in her head.

_No, there really hadn't been, _she says now. She adds unnecessarily, _Melody Williams is now looking at a wall._

_Yes, I gathered that._

_And they've loaded us onto an gravity dispenser to pulls us along easier to see Bad Wolf who-was-flowers._

_Lovely. _

_Is this that ironic tool language uses to say something while meaning something else? I thought I should ask now because I will need to know later in the past for when my John or Melody Williams used it._

_You bet its sarcasm._

_I'd thought so, because you told me now. If Melody Williams wants to, she can move the scanner around the console to view other than a wall or a door or that potted veluptisar we will pass right now._ Melody watches the potted plant sail by; oddly enough, it resembled a purple fern. Darkolls seemed to have a thing for bright colors, if the part of the hallway she'd seen was anything to go by. _A bit like a periscope, _Braveheart adds with wry amusement, _which is not the American college student with five different fates. Periscope Brown, don't drop a spanner. It's my blinky light on top that allows us to see. _

Melody swivels the scanner round the TARDIS console. She previews a picturesque painting of some flowers in a gilt frame, the opulent stretch of the hallway receding behind them, and three guards before running unexpectedly into the back of John's head. A band of worry around her heart loosens considerably at the sight of his stupid ruff of hair—they hadn't been separated then. Good.

Noh, however, is nowhere to be seen.

_That isn't as good, _Braveheart supplies for her.

_No, my dear, it very much isn't. _Worry for her new-found friend tangling with relief over John, Melody quickly scans the rest of the way. Three more guards, all with guns; it's strange how they look like very humanoid birds, but Melody supposes that she's going to have to get used to that quickly enough, if she's traveling with John throughout space. It's a very large hallway they're walking down, opulent to the point of gaudiness. Where were they, the palace?

_Yes,_ the TARDIS says.

_Fantastic._

_That's sarcasm! _The delight in her voice is palpable. _I recognize it now. And this is where Melody Williams and my John needed to be._

_I know. Just next time warn us beforehand you're going somewhere we're not expecting._

_I make no promises. Sometimes it'll turn out better if you don't know where you're going at all._

_Great._

_I choose to ignore the sarcasm._

Sighing, Melody swivels back to John. From the looks of things, his hands are cuffed in front of him. He walks a good five paces in front of the TARDIS, a guard on either side, their guns held waiting at their sides should he try anything. They approach a double-wide door big enough to fit the TARDIS through; the Darkoll who Melody can only assume is the lead guard, he's so bedecked in glittering medals, approaches the guard standing sentry. They converse for a moment, their voices pitched too low for Melody to hear over the scanner; the sentry then clacks something into the oddly recognizable walkie clipped to his uniform. The doors swing open and everyone's ushered inside.

The room they enter into is light-walled and low ceilinged. Beautiful photographs frame the walls, and the furniture is willowy and graceful. A brightly colored Darkoll, the brightest colored Melody's seen yet, is sitting on one of the chairs reading a book. He looks up at their approach, the gold circlet on his brow catching the sun streaming in from the large bay windows. He's obviously the king, or prime minister or ambassador or whatever passes for the leader of a planet in a corporate empire.

Two men stand in corners of the room, dark figures to protect their king, their plumage mottled shades of blue and grey. They begin to crowd into the room upon the opening of the door, but the king lazily waves them back. Standing in front of the windows is Ian; he's wearing a perfectly tailored suit, the vortex manipulator strapped to his wrist. Melody feels sick. _Not Ian._

He leans forward, murmurs something to the woman standing next to him; her back is to the room. She laughs at what he says, places a hand on his arm. Her hair falls loose to her shoulders, catches yellow bright in the sun. Melody recognizes her instantly.

"Hello Rose," John says.


	18. hey there sunshine

**A/N: To Guest - whoever you are, thank you for your kind review. ~madis**

* * *

"What's up Doc?" She laughs at him, and God, how he wishes it was her, his Rose, his Rosie lass, who slipped her hand small and cool into his as they waited on the Prime Minister of China. Rose'd rolled her eyes at him, because they'd been greeting the arriving guests for little over an hour. She'd leaned in close to confide that her feet were killing her, caught up in heels. _Why don't you go barefoot? _he'd asked her, and she'd done just that, kicking off her shoes right there in the entry hall. She went barefoot the whole night and was so beautiful he couldn't catch his breath to look at her.

It hits him the same way now, looking at her. She is wearing her hair down, the way she knows he likes it, and her smile is all for him, tongue between her teeth. But it's not his Rose at all, and he has to remember that.

When he'd grabbed her hand, all those years ago, and told her to run from Nesteen duplicates, did he ever think it would come to this? Would he have still grabbed her hand?

He'd like to think yes.

John doesn't laugh back at her, doesn't smile, doesn't say anything at all. He can't; all the words he wants to say burn inside him bright as fish.

Rose pouts at him. "No? Not funny? Not even a little? Strange—you always had a sense of humor."

"Is this him?" This from the Darkoll king. His gaze fixes on John, his head crest rising with curiosity. "The one you told us about with the magic box? He's very pretty."

"Not your type, Jondor. He's into women. Women he can dazzle with his stars." She saunters up to John, Ian a step or two behind her. What is he, her bodyguard? The glare John sends him would have turned back Death, had Death been given cause to care. Ian won't look him in the eye.

Rose stops right in front of John, toe to toe. Bottle-green eyes meet brown ones. That's what had tipped it off for her, really, although it had taken her months to figure out the why of it.

His eyes.

He has Donna's eyes.

And then he wasn't the Doctor after all.

She holds John's gaze for a moment or two more, her face young-bright-clear of any make up. He's never seen her look younger, or more grown up. His Rose—what did he do to her, that she fell this far? What had she done to herself? It still isn't too clear.

The Tyler family had died, all except Rose, because she had been with him. He'd had it all picked out: the location, the ring, the time. She'd smiled and cried and said yes, teased him that maybe they should forego the traditional wedding all together and elope, wouldn't Mum have a fit?

And then that damn phone call.

_The bright lights of the hospital twirling around them as they slammed through the doors, the great black fingers streaking down her face from the mascara, his complete inability to cry because if this is what it meant to be human he doesn't want it anymore because God, please. Tony was only three._

Rose brushes by them all, steps around John, the guards beside him, the colonel, the room, everything. Right up to the TARDIS, suspended a foot in the air by the anti-grav mats around the cherry red bulk of her, humming golden bright through the wooden-square lines of the room. Rose runs her hands down the TARDIS's sides, leans into the weight of her, luxurious and alone. She presses her mouth close to the wood panels, breathes in the scent of her, closes her eyes for just a moment, because she has her, her savior that will take her across the Howling to someone who just might be able to fix the pounding inside her head.

Never mind that the TARDIS is only a child.

Never mind that the pounding is a drum-rat-a-tat-tat-beat of four.

Never mind any of that at all.

* * *

John isn't sure which is worse. Someone you love in the face of a stranger? Or a stranger whom you once loved?

* * *

"Leave us," she tells everyone. And they all obey her. Every single one. They all leave, even the guards, even the king, who leers in John's direction as he passes by; John merely responds with a raised eyebrow.

"Agent Seven Eighty-Nine," she murmurs to Ian as he passes her. He stops in a crisp, fluid movement that tells of military.

"Ma'am."

"Go get a land lock for the TARDIS. And then bring her back here. I'd like to be with her."

In the affirmative, now: "Ma'am."

From his gallbladder, John's heart sinks down to his toes. Any further and it'd be beneath the floorboards. If the TARDIS was land locked he wouldn't be able to go anywhere at all. Time travel was already ruled out, due to being deeply entrenched in the timeline of the inhabitants here (although it'll be guesswork now, not having time lines to see straight, when they could take off and leave again), and the land lock would rule out teleportation. They'd be well and truly stuck, Melody and he and Noh, if he's even able to find Noh from wherever they took her.

Melody, who's still inside the TARDIS, who will run out of food eventually.

He really, really hopes that talking to Rose won't take that long, because torture does not sit well with anyone, even half-breeds with a resiliency for bouncing back from trauma.

(Does Melody honestly think that he'll ever voluntarily tell her when he's in pain? He's gone through much sterner stuff than a migraine _his head being split open like a ripe melon_. It had taken him several weeks to escape the Institute, find the manipulator and land unexpectedly in New York, 1969. Then always the running. Several weeks trapped in white white walls and a cold metal slab for a bed and pain.)

Ian begins to guide the TARDIS along; she bobs in the air, the anti-grav mats working to keep her afloat. He gets her halfway through the doors before Rose bites her lip, blurts out "Wait." Ian stops, looks at her, gaze questioning.

"Wait," she adds. "Don't take her just yet. Stand her there, in the far corner." Ian maneuvers the TARDIS into the corner on the farther end of the room, unobtrusively moving to stand in front of it when he'd done so. (Ensuring that no one could get in or out.)

Great. Well, you had to count your chickens somewhere; otherwise you'd never know how many you had.

* * *

"Rose," he says, ensuring to keep his tone brittle bright. "Why am I here?"

Rose turns away from the TARDIS, fixes John with a slow smile. "I wanted to talk to you. Sit down?" She gestures to the empty chairs; his hands clenching into fists underneath the cold line of his handcuffs, he moves across the room, painfully aware of her watching him. He sits down on the chair that the king—Jondor—had vacated mere minutes ago. She doesn't sit, moving about the room, thick and golden, heavy-pawed. A lioness, eying the downtrodden antelope, although he rather thinks he'd be a cheetah or a giraffe or something, rather than an antelope. (Never guessing that he's actually a lion too.)

When she speaks again she'd somewhere behind him. "I've missed you," she admits, voice pitched low.

"No you didn't." He isn't sure what game Rose is playing, but he wants no part in it.

"Oh, don't be like that. It's been what? Five years for you, since we last saw one another? Not counting the time you stole my TARDIS. My shining hope."

He sighs, and the worn out grooves of the argument come back to him, rustling along the edges of his mind like doves. "She's a child, Rose" he says. "It'll rip her to shreds—no telling what it'll do to the rest of our universe. The War closed off all gateways between universes—and us punching holes through the rift in between certainly didn't help matters."

"That's not important." She puts her hand on his shoulder, circles him close, the curve of her brushing his upper arm. John does his best not to flinch. With her other hand she reaches out, maps the crow's feet at the corners of his eyes. Age in a face formerly ageless—another reminder of what, exactly, he was. With her thumb she traces the faint freckles littering the pale curved plane of his cheekbone. She loves those blemishes, those pale brown dots mapping out his constellations, because only she was allowed to get close enough to count them.

He allows her to trail her other hand up the curve of his shoulder, neck, jawline, the fragile shape of his ear, allows her to cup his face between her small hands. She stands right in front of him now, her thighs brushing against his knees. In her eyes he searches for any trace of the girl who had loved the puzzling shape of his heart.

"You look absolutely stupid with those glasses," she informs him, her hands light and cool on his skin. "Wherever did you find them?"

Tentatively, carefully, he sends out a thin line of telepathic inquiry towards her; his mind brushes against the shape of hers. He'd still retained a bit of telepathic abilities, the last vestiges of a man he wasn't anymore, not really. The skill is fuzzy, indistinct from not being used, like dust gathering along the curvature of a lemon, piling on thick and violet-grey. But it's there.

A quick brush across her mind, like looking through someone's window as you pass by their house, through the blinds and the electric blue florescence from the telly to the dim silhouette of people inside. Just a quick glimpse, and she never went to any academy whatsoever, and compared to Prydonian the psychic training that the Institute gives their employees is rudimentary at best.

(The Doctor would have asked permission first, but the Doctor isn't here.)

The only thought on his mind is that maybe he can fix her.

_The yowling void of cold and dark. Alone, in the far corners of your mind, alone, alone, and you can never remember who the faces are, crack crack crack blue radiation what is blue. The monsters, their faces white. You are never alone, but you're always alone, you never—cold dark alone what was so frightening? You don't remember. Cracking blue radiation over your skin as you_

_you find him. You always_

_you_

_you always_

_you_

_you always crackling blue find the Doctor. White faces in the dark but you're always alone, no one's here the color blue cool aquamarine blue blue find doctors maybe he can—_

_Green is the wrong color._

John claws out of her mind, scrambling panic on the beach of her consciousness. For one brief moment he isn't sure who is the flower and who is the man anymore—then he breaks free with a shudder. His hands are shaking. All of this has taken no more than three seconds, tops. Rose isn't even aware that anything's happened, that he'd breached the defenses of her soul and cracked open the tiniest sliver of a walnut.

The handcuffs bite into his wrists. Even though her mind leaves him screaming inside, he covers it up with a smile. John's always been a great liar. "Oi!" he protests, voice soft catching on his utter terror for her (of her). Brainy specs are cool."

"No they're not," she says evenly. "They're completely idiotic."

Impossibly, despite all, he feels slapped pink-raw at her derision of his fashion sensibilities, and the part of his mind that is always considering, calculating working wheels down deep takes the time to coolly notice how different it is when Melody calls him daft, and Rose idiotic.

"But they're you," she adds, "so I suppose I must get used to them." She bridges the rest of the gap between them to kiss him. Rose tastes like winter, cold and bitterness, and the skin of her lips is chapped. He hesitates, blindingly aware of Ian standing there, and Melody without a doubt at the scanner, and how much of this is his Rose? He allows her mouth to fill his. It is sharp, and he tries to tell her through this moment of stolen intimacy how he's still fighting for her, he's still holding out for that girl who stopped him from killing a Dalek in a bunker, so long ago now.

He still believes in her.

Putting his handcuffed hands between them, he pushes her back. "Rose." He swallows, unused to begging. So proud, her half-human man, almost arrogant if he wasn't so kind. "Please. I'll find a way to get you to him—I-I won't stop till I find him for you. But please, _please, _leave her alone. The TARDIS is only a child; she's not our TARDIS, who's a millennium old, and tough as nails, a scrapper. Braveheart's young, and impulsive, and she'll die." It's nothing he hasn't told Rose before.

She weighs him for a moment, still leaning in, her breath fanning across his face. Her eyes are dark, an entire network of tree roots in her eyes digging down into the secret heart of the earth, black with no sunlight.

He sees the exact moment she pulls away from him. _(His eyes bottle green.)_

"Where's Melody?" she asks, her grip digging tight into his face.

John's humanity betrays him. Instinctively his eyes flick over to the TARDIS, where Melody is preferably waiting for an opportune moment to rescue him.

"Ah," Rose says, her mouth curling into a smile. "Thank you."

She slaps him. Because he isn't expecting it, the force is enough to knock him sprawling out of his chair onto the floor. He lands hard on his side, pain blossoming at his shoulder. Bruises, there are definitely going to be bruises later. Lovely.

Several things happen simultaneously. There's indistinct shouting in the corridor outside, followed by the main doors bursting open. One of the guards posted outside the door collapses into the room, revealing Noh, one of the antique electrically charged hauberks in hand. She must've gotten it down from a wall. Melody barrels out of the TARDIS, the gun Ian gave her in hand. The TARDIS door slams into Ian's head; he goes down, begins to struggle to his feet immediately. Melody shoots him; he falls again, lies spread-eagled. Barely taking the time to aim, Melody shoots at Rose, too. Missing by a mile, the shot splats green into the far wall.

John twists to his feet, turns to Rose—

He loses thirty seconds.

Remembering that he's forgotten something important (again) and that Rose, somehow, is gone, he blinks to find Melody trying to sonic him free of his handcuffs. She'd dropped the gun. Her hands are shaking too much for her to work the sonic.

"Don't worry, don't worry," she says, over and over again. "I set it on stun; I made sure it was on stun."

Noh gently pushes Melody aside, takes the sonic from her to free John herself. The cuffs drop free; rubbing his wrists, John nods towards Ian. "Cuff him." Handing John the sonic, Noh goes and does just that.

He takes the time to envelop Melody in a brief hug. "Rose slapped you," she whispers into his chest, her arms wrapping around the galloping pace of his heart.

"Yes, she did." He unwraps himself from her to pick his glasses up from the floor; other than a bent frame they appear to be unharmed. He pockets them along with the sonic. "Now has anyone seen what they did with my coat?"


	19. keep him safe

**A/N: Unexpected chapter update for last Tuesday! There should be two more chapters for this "episode" as you will, then we can move on with things. Trust me-it's going to be one rollicking ride. See everyone (hopefully) with a new chapter Tuesday! ~madis**

* * *

As John shrugs on his coat, Noh handcuffs Ian to the railing of the stairwell; he lies half on, half off the stairs, arm twisted up behind him where he's cuffed, well out of reach of the console proper if he'd even woken up to try anything. A bright red scorch mark slashes violently across his forehead and into his scalp from where Melody had shot him; she feels absurdly guilty about it.

She remembers Rose calling him Agent Seven Eighty-Nine, Ian flashing his badge of clearance at the nurses to get John and her out of the hospital without payment. Agent Seven Hundred and Eighty-Nine. How would it feel to have your own mother not know who you were? Unlike River or Ian, or in the ironic twist with Rose and her father, it's not something Melody's ever had to go through, and something she never will go through, because her mother's dead.

But Ian's mother very much isn't dead.

Melody cannot blame him for wanting to protect Rose, for wanting to be with her in whatever capacity he could. She would do the same with Amy and Rory, if she could, spend one more day with them, despite the fact that she would have to lie to them about who she was. It would be worth it.

_And it's not like we didn't _know_ he was a Time Agent, _Melody reasons with herself. _He admitted as much the first time met him._ She's sitting on one of the two jump seats that corner the console room floor, aware by the flat press of his mouth as he prepares them for lift off that John is not happy. Her bruises scream at her to never pick up a gun ever again. Melody can make no promises. Frantic, she'd run down the corridors to John's room (finding it a few turns closer than she remembered it being the last time), pilfering the pistol Ian had given her from John's nightstand. Back in the console room, her hands shook as she tried to piecemeal together whatever John had done to disable the pistol, using one of the sonics. How in the world was she supposed to point and think if she didn't know what she was pointing and thinking about?

She couldn't stop remembering the time she'd spent in Rose's company, the pain she'd endured. She couldn't let John go through that—she wouldn't. Using the scant few memories she had of the Doctor fixing guns in the past (or watching River do it herself), most of the memories hazy and indistinct the way one generally remembers memories of dreams, she'd managed to click the pistol together. She reasoned that if she was very, very lucky, she might be able to use the pistol to what? Rescue John and Noh, save the day? The very idea was preposterous, one lone girl against the entirety of the palace guard and however many Time Agents Rose had, but Melody had to try. Besides, she had the TARDIS, and that had to count for something, right?

She'd looked in just enough time to see Rose slap John.

She hadn't even known if the pistol would really work properly, she'd just flicked the switch on the side of the pistol to _stun, _burst out of the TARDIS doors and started shooting, because John was in trouble, because they were hurting him. It was pure instinct.

Melody now knows exactly how River feels about keeping the Doctor safe, and that scares her.

She fiddles with the cuff with one of her sleeves. There are four black hash marks running perpendicular up her forearm. Melody doesn't even remember _making_ those.

Complications upon complications that all seemed to be tied up in the forget-me-not creatures, Melody crossing her own time stream braining people with a cricket bat, and the unconscious young man currently handcuffed to the stairwell.

Melody just wishes time would stand still for a little while.

She just can't believe that Ian can't be redeemed, that he can't become the man she met so briefly at the hospital, who'd said he only joined the Agency to figure out how vortex manipulators worked, even though he'd actually joined the Time Agency so he could be his mother's bodyguard. Because he can talk to the TARDIS even more so than Melody can, because he helped Braveheart feel better about Jack's death, because he's obviously going to be someone very important to Melody's future, because he's John's son.

For John she would turn the whole world over.

_Ian Noble will be safe making, _Braveheart interjects, and Melody can feel her love for Ian looming over him, brushing softly against the back of his dreams.

Melody's throat tightens. Now that she knew what to look for, Ian's resemblance to John is all she can see. _Yes,_ Melody vows. _Ian Noble will be as safe as houses. _

"Here." Melody looks up, startled out of her reverie, to find Noh handing Melody her pistol. "You dropped it out there," Noh adds. "Thought you might need it."

"Thanks." Not really wanting to, Melody takes the pistol from her. It's heavy, the weight of it dragging through her arms. She hadn't noticed how heavy it was, before. Quickly, Noh shoves a square piece of white paper into Melody's other hand. Melody raises her eyebrows at her. "I searched his pockets," Noh hisses. "This was the only thing in there. I think it's something you'd want to see."

Melody nods, curls her hand around the slip of paper.

Pounding on the TARDIS doors makes Melody jump. John pops his head around the side of the time rotor. "All ship-shape for take-off?" he chirps. "Looks like they're pretty unhappy with us for trying to escape. Really, you'd think their response time would be better than that."

"I might have something to do with that," Noh says wryly, moving over to the railing to brace herself for the flight. John raises his eyebrows at her.

"You?" he asks, surprised.

"Me," Noh confirms. "Electrical hauberks can apparently cause quite a lot of havoc, especially to live security feeds." She affectionately pats the pilfered hauberk propped up on the railing beside her, looking entirely too pleased with herself. Noh doesn't elaborate any further, and after a moment more John shrugs, ducks back around the console. They take off with a shudder and the _vworping_ of the time rotor, leaving the palace far behind them.

By the flat press of his mouth, Melody can tell John isn't very happy.

Bracing herself against the jump seat as the TARDIS jolts along, she asks, _Is he alright?_

_No, _Braveheart replies. _He's not._

Melody really hadn't expected anything less.

* * *

They land in a storage closet. John waylays the first person he sees out in the hall outside to go let Commanders Braxtall and Brix know they're here. With a wide-eyed look in Melody's direction, the soldier does just that. He could have been Jarn's brother, with his dark skin and height, except for the feathers that intermingled with his hair and his eyes, which are slightly too wide set to be human.

"Darkolls and Injalls have been secretly intermarrying for years," John explains happily as he bounds along the corridor. "It's terribly illegal, of course, but the Darkoll's culture has been intermingled with the inhabitants of the planets they've conquered for so long that the separation of the two would be suicide, on any world. Absolutely brilliant! Then of course you come along, Melody, giving them hope. Hah! We'll liberate these people yet, both of them together."

_Oh John, _Melody thinks. _Oh John. _Her brave, foolish soldier. Must he always save the entire world by himself?

_But I'm here, _she thinks with a savage fierceness that surprises her. _John won't have to do it on his own._

She won't let him rattle steam-ship empty alone through the universe.

John guides them through a series of long hallways, stride intent and purposeful. Meldoy and Noh have to scurry to keep up. The hallways are simple and grey, built for functionality and not beauty. Doors, some open, some closed, are all made of a dark brown wood; the globes of light hanging from the ceiling are gaseous and cast a strange yellow pall over everything. The people they pass are all in army fatigues; they fall silent as John, Melody, and Noh approach, and as soon as they pass by an outbreak of whispers starts up. Melody's sure they're not talking about the fact that Noh has the hauberk in one hand, looking exceptionally fierce, or that John looks like a hipster with his spectacles. She wishes her hair was any other color but red.

John was right: prophecies really are nothing but trouble.

They approach a wooden door at the end of a hallway; John pushes it open, ignoring the guard on duty, who sits up with a start. "Hallo!" John calls out, allowing the door to slam into the opposite wall. "We've arrived. Before that soldier I sent along, I believe. There he is—you're a bit slow passing along messages, young man."

"You're late," a woman says dryly.

John squints. "Am I? Well, I did warn you." He moves into the room, Noh and Melody following. The room is large; desks piled with papers compete for space with large screens, holo-vids relaying information across six other worlds, including their own. Another large light, which Melody finds out later are called sarls, hangs large and bright in the middle of the room, a miniature sun. Taking up most of the space in the center of the room is a large grey table; a hologram of Darkoll V, which is the name of the world they're on, lies flickering blue over the table. The absence of windows, and the abundance of the sarls, only leads Melody to the assumption that they're underground. The entire room is a strange mix of the mundane and the futuristic. Melody can't help but be put in mind of those war rooms you see in the movies, where the leaders are gathered around the large table in the center, the soldiers scattered about the room at desks, relaying commands and filling out orders.

The room is absolutely cluttered with people, some Darkoll, some Injall, some a strange mix of both. The Darkoll's love of color can be seen in the way they'd spruced up their uniforms with geometric designs of startling beauty, as well as in their plumages; the Injall are more reserved, favoring the more natural tones of the uniforms themselves, their skin tone a range of dark brown, almost black, to a startling paleness even whiter than Melody.

One by one everyone stops what they're doing, focuses instead on Melody. A hush fills the room, until the only sound is the whirring of the globe in the center of the table as it spins on its axis. Melody can feel the weight of their eyes on her, and their hope in her. She shrinks back into Noh, who places a reassuring arm around her shoulders.

The woman who had spoken earlier studies Melody with frank curiosity. She is Darkoll in origin, her eyes wide and grey in the fresh pink and blue feathers of her face. "Commander Brix," John says, "I would like to introduce you to, ah, Mrs. Noble. Melody, this is Commander Brix. She's one of those who first started the resistance on this planet around, oh, a hundred years ago or so."

"Yes, I know who she is," Brix breathes, her gaze never leaving Melody's. Her gaze sweeps over Melody, lingering for a moment on her hair. Melody shifts, uncomfortable under the weight of her stare. Brix walks around the command table, stopping in front of Melody. She startles her by taking her hand in her own; her hand is covered in a soft down of feathers, like a newly hatched chick, which deepens into actual feathers the further up her arm. The down ends right around the knuckle, where she has three fingers and a thumb; they're curiously dry to the touch, and a soft mottled shade of pink. "Traveler, we welcome you," she says formally, her voice clicking over the words. She bows over Melody's hand, her fingers bunching up curiously over the back of it. Melody remembers Jarn doing the exact same thing, although his greeting had been slightly less antiquated. She's touched at this gesture, this sign that the two cultures had blended into one another despite the violent attempts to keep them apart.

Squaring her shoulders, Melody says, "I'm sorry it's taken me so long to get here. What can I do to help?"

* * *

A man who is a blend of the two races, his features mostly human but with pale white feathers mixed in his dark hair, introduces himself as Commander Braxtall. He is an extremely pleasant fellow, and runs over the plans with Melody. John hovers over her shoulder; she is hyper aware of the weight of hi, looming behind her. The side of his arm occasionally brushes against her as he leans in to point at something on the charts.

Noh drinks in the room with her archaeologist eyes, enjoying history forming itself around her. She leans casually against the command table, trading jokes with a fair-haired Injall office aide. Her eyes, however, miss nothing the room has to offer.

After a little while, after he's sure she's going to be alright on her own, John leaves Melody to move Ian from the TARDIS, so that if he wakes up and manages to break free he won't break all of time and space. He pats her reassuringly on the shoulder, tells her she'll be fine, he'll be right back; she eyes him as he leaves. Melody's feels so unequipped for this it's not even funny. But the presence of Noh reassures her, and Commander Braxtall offers her a reassuring smile. Smiling back at him, Melody asks just how, exactly, they planned on storming the capital.

* * *

After a while John comes back. He moves about the room, trading low words with the office aids, cracking jokes, rippling along the room. Melody, long past exhausted, had taken a seat angled into the command table. It's all linear lines, uncomfortable enough to keep her awake; she listens to the Commanders as they refine Melody's speech, passing it back and forth between them like the rounded edges of a baseball. Melody sighs; her eyelids are heavy suitcases, and her throat aches from being strangled almost to death, her body aches from the bruises, the scratches from the hot sand and people's fingernails clawing at anything they could reach to take her down, from the whole entire day. Crossing her arms over her stomach, she closes her eyes, thinks about Jarn, all those people: the girl with the long fall of brown hair, the old man who reminded her of mining. All dead now.

"There was a boy," she says abruptly, interrupting the Commanders' conversation. They both stop and look at her. Melody flushes a bit under their scrutiny. "His name was Jarn. I'd like—I'd like to talk to his parents. Please. I mean—I mean not right now, but later. Eventually." Behind the spinning holo-globe, she sees John stop to touch Noh on the shoulder. She had been fiddling with the hauberk, causing it to spark wildly. The people around her began to eye her warily; when she caught them doing it she grinned at them and said "I know what I'm doing."

Now John leans down to whisper something in Noh's ear. She looks up at him, biting her lip, nods after a moment and follows him out. Melody wonders what that's all about—she supposes she'll just have to ask John later.

"Of course, Mrs. Noble," Braxtall assures her.

Brix follows Melody's gaze. "He was really worried about you," she says softly.

"Was he?" Melody feels silly for even doubting, because it's John—of course he worried. She wonders why Commander Brix is even telling her this.

"Of course. Absolutely terrifying in his worry. He'd have done anything to rescue you. Luckily there we were, wanting to rescue you just as much as he did."

Melody looks at her, asks her why she's telling her this. It's Commander Braxtall who answers, his eyes kind. "Just be careful, Mrs. Noble. That's all. We aren't too sure what losing you would do to him, and we can't have anything get in the way of the revolution."

Melody can only assume this is why they have her doing, as John put it, "moral bolstering" and the like. When she surmises as much Braxtall nods. "Yes. Exactly."

She hears what he's really saying: that John is a loose cannon when it comes to her, but she can't believe that, not really. While she can't doubt that John was frantic to get her back, Melody has more faith in him than that. He'll do the right thing in the end, even if it meant harm to his companion. Because ultimately the Doctor and Donna would both do the exact same thing. And John is more than the sum of them together.

By the time they send her off to bed a short while later, John and Noh still haven't returned.


	20. i'm a time traveler, remember?

**A/N: I apologize for Ian in advance, okay? He refused to be anything other than First Person POV. The rascal. Thank you guys for your lovely reviews; they really make my day. Without further ado:**

* * *

Melody wakes up to the lightest of touches on her shoulder. She starts, rolling away from the touch, her mind still caught in the tangled web of very long scarves. Rolling over, she squints upwards. "Doctor?" she mumbles, recognizing his silhouette backlit by the small sarl that's been left one to guide Melody to the bathroom if she needed it. The Doctor goes very still; his hand falls from her shoulder. He shifts a bit, the light crackling down the side of his face, twisting the shadows into darker shapes. She blinks, recognizes him.

"John." Her voice comes out cracked from strained vocal chords and a dry throat; she coughs, trying to clear it.

"Here," he says, voice much subdued. He hands her a glass of water.

She sits up, the sheets tangling around her legs. Her muscles screech in protest at the abrupt movement, but she ignores them. She takes the glass from him, gulping down the water until the glass is half-empty. Handing it back to him and rubbing her eyes, she gives a bone-cracking yawn. "What time is it?"

He sets the glass down next to the Alpha Meson pistol on the end table beside the bed; Melody had just enough presence of mind last night to take the pistol out of her holster before she crashed. "You were asleep for three hours, give or take. I would've had you sleep longer, but Ian woke up. I'd like you to be there when I talk to him."

This instantly wakes her mind up the rest of the way. Ian Noble. Of course. She can't help but feel a bit flattered, that John would want her there while he talked Ian, and also a strange twisty guilt because he is John Noble, not the Doctor.

She swings her legs over the side of the bed. She'd collapsed onto the bed the night before, not even bothering to take off her shoes, had been hallway asleep before her head even hit the pillow, so she only really gets a good look at the room she's in now. It was all four cornered walls and minimalism: there was the bed, the chest of drawers, the nightstand. Plain grey sheets are neatly tucked into the corners of the bed, only now slightly rumpled from Melody sleeping atop it, a pillow, crisp white sheets. A door leading to the bath is set into the wall opposite. Functionality, not frivolity; it could have been anybody's room. Melody just hopes she's not kicking anyone out by staying here.

John won't quite look at her. He's crouching next to bed, hands loose over his knees; she takes one of his hands, enfolds them in both of hers. The work rough of his skin catches on the edge of her wrist as she says, "I'm sorry. I didn't—I know you're not him. Well you are, but you're also you and—and I just wanted you to know that." Her face grows hot; she's pretty sure you could fry an egg on it by this point. She's not explaining this at all well. "I was dreaming about you when you woke me up."

"You dreamt about me?" he asks. She cannot puzzle out his voice from where it hid beneath his bowed head.

"You know I do most nights, especially after Rose—after I was drugged for—for however long that was. It used to be whether I'd dream about you or not; now it's more a matter of whether I'll remember the dreams in the morning. I normally do remember, probably because they're not exactly dreams."

He sighs, folds her hands over into both of his, shifting his weight on the floor. He studies the pale arches of her fingers, and the faint rainbow sheen where her scars had been caught in the skin graft. It was just visible in the glow of the sarl, and even then only if you knew where to look. "What was I doing in your dream?" he asks, voice low.

"Oh, um, you—you were with Sarah. A very long scarf, wild bush of hair, very tall—I'm not sure which regeneration is which, so—"

"That was my fourth."

"Your fourth regeneration then. He was very rude, and magnificent. And Harry was there; he informed you that you should sell the TARDIS."

That catches a smile from him. "Harry was an imbecile. A brave imbecile, but an imbecile."

"Yeah," she giggles, the laugh tumbling along the insides of her mouth so it halfway turned into a sob. "He was." She pauses, says, "John, I don't know how old I am."

He looks up at her at that, and the light of the sarl turns his shadows over, highlighting the bridge of his nose.

"I don't—I don't know. When I said I was twenty-three, when we argued—it was the first number that flew into my head. But I realized after that I don't actually _know—_I was too drugged out." She twists her hands free to rub her face. Pinching the bridge of her nose, she squeezes her eyes shut, mumbles, "And I saw older me too, in the arena. The one who rescued you with the cricket bat. She—she saved my and Noh's life. She said than she was a year older that I am now, but she seemed so unsure about it. I'm pretty sure she was lying; I'm a bad liar." She looks up to find John staring at her, shocked. "Isn't it a bad thing, mucking about in my own past? What could be happening, what could be so urgent that I'd cross my own time stream to come visit? And there's these, too." She shows John the black marks on the inside of her wrist. "The forget-me-not creatures were there, with you and Rose in that room. And I don't know what that means."

She closes her eyes again, rubs her face again. The bed dips under John's weight as he comes to sit beside her. "Let's see," he says delicately, voice picking over the words. He lifts her hands away from her face. Peering at her, he smiles encouragingly, addresses the only thing in that knotty mess of problems he can fix. "Eh Melody? Alright? What's the last age you remember being?"

"I met Rose right after Dad died. I was nineteen then, so . . . twenty-one and a half. Right after she came back with the Dimension Canon—she had been trying to find you. I—after that they, well. You know. I couldn't understand why; I thought maybe something had happened, that the Institute had been taken over by someone, that there'd been a coup. Even when Rose came to see me that first time I didn't understand . . . I didn't want to, really. She was my friend." Melody smiles wryly, lifts one shoulder in a shrug. "But that's more than you asked for. I'm sorry."

"Don't apologize." He tucks Rose away into a small drawer in a corner of his heart, focuses on Melody. "I'm really alright."

They both know he's lying, but Melody doesn't press the issue.

"I came and picked you up in two-thousand twelve, because I was running from the Institute for five years but ended up a year earlier when I stole back the TARDIS, and then it was only a week back and hello Melody! I got to punch Jack in the nose, which was fun. I hope I broke it."

"John, you didn't just pick me up, you rescued me from torture."

Now it's his turn to shrug. "Semantics. So Melody, congratulations—you are officially twenty-five years old. How does it feel?"

She ducks her head in a smile. "Old. But it's nice to know. Thank you John."

"Ach, don't mention it." He bounces to his feet, dragging Melody up with him. "Come on," he chirps, swinging their hands between them. "Time to go interrogate Ian!"

"You sound way too happy about this prospect."

"No. Noooo." He drags his head back and forth. Melody looks at him. "Weell, maybe a bit excited. Just a bit. We might get some answers, like who Ian is, what he was doing with Rose—that'll be nice, yes?"

"Yes." Melody swallows, can't quite look John in the eye, because she knows exactly who Ian is, and why he was with Rose, but she isn't sure if she can tell John. Remembering River, how long she'd kept silent about her own parentage to Amy and Rory, Melody doesn't want to risk it.

She excuses herself to go wash the sleep out of her eyes and brush her teeth with something that she's pretty sure is a toothbrush. Squinting at her reflection in the mirror, she ineffectively tries to tug out the wrinkles in her waistcoat. No dice.

Telling herself not to be silly, she braids her hair. It takes three tries before she gets it right, having to stare into the mirror to track her work. She remembers when she used to be able to braid by feel alone; that's gone now. Her hair's just long enough and heavy enough that when she's done she's just able to leave it untied.

John smiles at her when she comes back out. He's standing by the door, hands clasped behind his back. "All done?"

"Yep." She walks up to him and gives him a hug. Startled, his arms automatically come around her. She tries to convey everything into that hug: how grateful she is that John's her friend, how sorry she is over Rose, her uncertainty over being "Mrs. Noble."

Melody's just tall enough that he's able to fit his head into the crook of her shoulder.

They stay clenched together like that for a while. Melody closes her eyes and listens to the rapid beat of his solitary heart.

* * *

Melody remembers the scrap of paper Noh had given her out in the corridor. She trots to catch up with John, who's striding ahead long-legged loose, like a giraffe. She makes awkward little head bobs to the people they pass, who all touch their fore, middle, and ring fingers to their foreheads as she and John pass by.

"Yes, yes, thank you—John," she calls out, tugging on the back of his peacoat to get him to stop.

He turns around with a "Hm?" and a head bob; sometime between when they'd left her room and now he'd taken the time to put on his spectacles again. She's horribly tempted to tease him about looking like a hipster, but refrains. Taking the folded scrap of paper from the back pocket of her trousers, she hands it to him. She'd stuffed it there when Noh had given it to her earlier, hadn't even unfolded it to see what was written there, had completely forgotten about it in the hullabaloo of being Mrs. Noble.

"I don't know what it is," she explains, "Noh just found it in one of Ian's pockets. She thought I would know what to do with it; I haven't even had a chance to look at it yet."

John shuffles them off to one side of the hallway, glancing around as he unfolds the paper. His eyebrows shoot up as he scans the contents. "What? What is it?!" Melody hisses. She stands on tip-toes, trying to see over the curve of John's hands to the contents of the paper.

He bats her off halfheartedly. "Now this _is_ interesting," he mumbles, more to himself than anything. "But I don't recognize half of these . . ." Snagging a pen out of his coat pocket (dropping a yoyo, a can of silly string, and the sonic on the floor), he backs the paper onto the wall and begins to scribble on it. Melody scrabbles to pick up John's mess; the people swarming up and down the hallway are staring, and one of them even stops to try and help. By the time Melody stammeringly thanks them and sends them on their way, John had thrown his pen down in frustration.

Running his hand through his hair and turning to her, wild eyed, he growls, "This doesn't make any sense! Half of the coordinates don't even _lead_ anywhere, and the other half shouldn't even work to begin with. Melody, darling, this universe is snapstitch."

"Snapstitch?"

"Snapstitch. Just _look."_ He thrusts the paper at her. Taking it, Melody looks down at it in befuddlement. It read as follows:

_1) Sigma G 8-75342_

_2) Sigma R 5-6904352_

_3) Theta 4-6904312_

_4) Sigma A 8-112789 _

_ 5) Sigma D 9-435678_

_6) Theta B 9-45721_

_7) Sigma L 3-6905422_

_8) Theta R 5-6904352_

_9) Theta S 6-75342_

_10) Sigma B 9-435678_

_11) Sigma A 1-357642_

The handwriting's unmistakably Ian's; he has that weird backhand updraft scrawl that's unmistakable. John's scribbled out calculations are shoved off to one side. "These are coordinates?" Melody asks, verifying.

"Coordinates that make absolutely no sense, yes. And you said that Noh found them in Ian's pockets?"

"Yes. Why? Is it what you talked about with Noh?"

He waves that away. "Oh, I just asked Noh if her intentions were honorable, that's all. No it's Ian. Who is Ian? I think we should go ask him, don't you?" Snagging the paper from her, John sets off down the hallway again; Melody follows at a half run to keep up.

* * *

When I come to, I'm laying awkwardly half on my side half sitting up on the floor, both of my hands handcuffed behind me to the back of a chair. Now normally this wouldn't be a problem, I'd just pick up the chair and run, but this is a "you're not going very far with this solid slab of wood before someone catches you" chair. So no dice. Besides, handcuffed to a chair is exactly where I want to be. If my memory serves me correct, I should have been captured by Dad and co and bundled up in the TARDIS to Resistance HQ. The stinging pain arching across my forehead only serves to validate my hypothesis.

Getting stunned by an Alpha Meson pistol? Yeah, not pleasant.

Squinting from the bright light of the sarl overhead, I shift so that I'm in a more comfortable position. The chair legs scrape on the floor as I wiggle it behind me until I'm semi comfortable. The room is empty except for my chair and another chair in the corner. There's a door, plain and wooden. There's probably a holographically disguised window somewhere; I don't bother looking for it. My vortex manipulator, however, is nowhere in sight, which is bad

"Hello," I call out instead. "I'm awake, if anybody wants to come talk to me. I'd love the company." No response, but I'm pretty sure that woke someone up.

Sure enough, fifteen minutes and twelve seconds later Dad slams the door open. He looks cheery, if a storm cloud knows how to look cheery. So not cheery then—_great. _This is as bad as when I was a teenager and snuck out to visit Anita. At least then he was somewhat proud of me for actually configuring a solar ship so that Anita and I could have our picnic.

He doesn't even know who I am.

Behind him comes _her, _and I should have expected it, I should have expected that she would be with him, but I didn't, and they're both so _young. _So. Young.

I don't think it's something I'll ever get used to.

Dad—no, John, I must get used to calling them both by their names unless I want to break casualty wide open, which would be bad, don't want to do that—John barrels right in; a piece of paper is crumbled in his right hand. Melody stays by the door, but when she looks at me she seems more hopeful than anything. I give her a quick smile, and her expression instantly shutters down. Why would—

Oh.

Right.

They think I'm a traitor.

Lovely.

Before John gets a chance to say anything, I make my move. "Look, look, I can explain. I swear it wasn't what it looked like. I'm not working for the Time Agency—well, I am, but for the Justice Department because I was the only one who could really blend in very well, who knew the back alleyways of time just enough that they'd even consider me for the Agency in the first place, and so yeah. Can you un-handcuff me now? Is that even a word, un-handcuff? I don't think it is. It should be."

Okay wow, shutting up now because that totally could have gone better. In fact, that was a complete train wreck. I should start over.

John and Melody stare at me. John's face is set, mouth jammed into that thin little line that's as stubborn as Garfield on a Monday. Knew he'd take some convincing anyway, so that doesn't bother me. Dad's as stubborn as a mule, always has been. Nine hundred some odd years of living as a Time Lord don't change that little fact. What _does_ bother me is the look of hesitancy on her face. Melody's face. Because out of everyone, she's the one I will hate lying to the most, and the one who I need to believe me most of all. Because I'm pretty sure I know what's going on here, just what exactly I'm supposed to do now, and that means I'm going to be lying a lot.

_I think Ian Noble should explain to them again, _Braveheart supplies unnecessarily. _My John will take some convincing. _

_Yes dear, I sort of realized that already. _

Tamping down my irritation (it's not Braveheart's fault, after all, that I have to ensure my parents get together), I say, "Lemme explain again. More succinctly, as it were."

"Please do." This from John. Melody takes the chair in the corner, dragging it over so she's sitting more or less in front of me; John opts for pacing. "We would dearly love an explanation Ian. About all of this, but most especially what you were doing with Ms. Wolfe."

Of course he'd want to know about Rose first off. If it was Anita I'd want to know. I close my eyes for a moment, because who knows how long it'll be until I see Anita again, my starfish girl. I then explain, in short, terse sentences, just what, exactly, I was doing as Rose Tyler's bodyguard.

For the last five years I've been working for the Justice Department as a freelance agent guy. I'm who they come to when nobody else has a clue what to do. Which is surprisingly often, come to think of it. For the time traveling policemen they are somewhat incompetent. Anyway, they approached me about two years ago, wanting to know if I could scope out the Institute for them, something about suspicious acts, the whatfor. And what perfect way to do that than joining the Time Agency, known bosom buddy to the Institute?

Of course, I had a completely different reason for wanting to infiltrate the Institute (namely ensuring my own existence by learning how vortex manipulators worked)but I wasn't about to tell the Justice Department that. Nor will I tell John and Melody about my ulterior motive either—paradoxes and all that. I'll be tampering enough in my own relative past as it is; don't want to push it.

When I'm done explaining there's this silence, like someone got hit with a sledgehammer and no one's quite sure what to do about it yet, give them a minute.

"I believe him," Melody says, and my heart dips and soars.

"Melody—" John begins, but Melody cuts him off with a look. They then do this thing where their eyes, communicating over my head the way they always did when I was a kid. Finally John sighs, takes out the sonic and un-cuffs me.

Ah parents. Gotta love them.


	21. upwards and onwards

Ian leaves with a grin, a wave, and a crack of thunder from his manipulator. He wouldn't tell them where he was going; only that he expected he'll see them soon. When Melody asked him about the Time Agency, Ian had paused for a moment before quipping, "Oh, my cover's blown by now anyway. No point in going back there."

Melody looks up at him; he really was exceptionally tall, even taller than John. "Are you sure you can't stay?" she asks him. They're waiting in the interrogation room for John to get back from snagging Ian's vortex manipulator. Apparently in his retrieval of Ian he'd stashed it somewhere about the TARDIS console before the Injalls sent to help him could notice it. It was tech far beyond their time; wouldn't want to change the course of history, now would we? All Time Agents were issued one, and Ian is no exception.

"We could really use your help," Melody adds.

She's sitting in the chair still; Ian's standing by the chair he was handcuffed to, hands crammed into the front pockets of his slacks, leg jiggling up and down. He'd loosened his tie and slung his suit jacket over the back of his chair, but he still looks crammed into his skin, like he'd rather be anywhere else than in this room, in these clothes.

He reminds Melody of John when he's been sitting in the TARDIS for too long; he'll bound to his feet, grab her by the hand, go explore Braveheart, because she is as brand new to him as he is to her.

_Of course he'd remind me of John, _Melody thinks. _He's his son. _She looks away when Ian looks at her.

"I hate suits," he blurts out suddenly. He paces the end of the room, turns back a sharp corner, stops in front of her. "I hate them. I absolutely—I absolutely despise them. Give me an—an ugly sweater and some jeans and I'll be fine." His mouth clams in, and for a moment he looks exactly like his father, except a slightly wider jaw and a longer mouth, and she can't catch her breath to look at him. "Hate them," he finishes, running his hands through his hair. With a short, unhappy laugh he adds, "God. He wouldn't—he wouldn't even leave you alone with me until you reminded him you had a gun to shoot me with."

"Ian . . ." Melody doesn't know what to say. "Ian, I—"

"It's alright," he says, even though it really isn't. "I talk too much."

He smiles down at her after a moment, adds, "To answer your question: no, I really can't stay and help, much as I wish to. I have important things I have to be doing, and they all have to do with coordinates on some list I'm supposed to receive soon. I can tell you something though—it's going to work. This." He waves his hand through the air to articulate "this". "The rebellion: it's going to work, and it's going to be amazing. Absolutely brilliant. Fantastic even." He hunkers down next to her, forgoing the chair. "The Free Republic is going to stretch across the next four thousand years and across six galaxies."

"That's spoilers," Melody chides gently.

"Well maybe it is," he says, "but it's a good spoiler, eh?"

Melody's spared from answering by the arrival of John, Noh hot on his heels. "Melody," Noh informs her, "the commanders want you. Something urgent." Her glance slides over Ian, cool and disinterested.

"Oh, um, alright." Melody wonders what on earth they would want her for; she'd thought they'd gone over everything with her during the briefing. Maybe something new had come up—something with Rose? "Ian, this is, um, Doctor Norma Jones."

"Pleasure," Ian chirps, grinning madly at her.

Noh's mouth tilts up. "Likewise. I hate to rush you, but they did say urgent, Melody."

"Right. Sorry." Turning to Ian, Melody sticks out her hand to shake. "Later Ian. Catch you in your future."

He clasps both of his hands around hers, peers searchingly into her face. "Take care of yourself," and with a cheeky grin in John's direction, "Mrs. Noble."

"Hardy har." Melody can't help but marvel at how open this Ian is compared to the guarded Ian she first met at the hospital. She can only assume it's in his future. Pocketing away those thoughts for later, she continues dryly, "You're a real riot."

"I do try."

Melody turns to John. "Be nice," she tells him. "We decided to trust him, remember?"

John rolls his eyes at her; his brogue comes out thick as he says, "Oh sure, sure, yeah, I'll remember that. Thanks."

"Right. And don't forget to show Ian the coordinates; maybe he can figure them out. They were, after all, in his pocket." The sour look John shoots at her is rather spoiled by the spectacles still perched on his nose; Melody only laughs at him.

Once they're in the empty corridor, Melody asks Noh what Commanders Brix and Braxtall wanted to talk to her about. "Absolutely nothing," Noh informs her brightly. "I lied. It just seemed best to let the two of them alone. I mean, John doesn't know he's his son, does he?"

Melody stops dead in the corridor. "_How did you know—" _she begins in a harsh whisper, horrified. Was it that obvious?

Noh hastens to reassure her. "We have a mutual friend at the university, Ian and I. Of course, we've never met before now, and when we did meet he was much older . . . the liar. He looked at me as if I was complete stranger!"

"John _can't _know, he can't, it might—"

"—paradoxes, really bad things happening, yeah, I know." Noh fixes her with a look. "I'm a _time-traveling _archaeologist, remember? Your secret's safe with me." She begins to saunter down the corridor again; after a stunned pause, Melody scrambles to keep up. "Now," Noh says, "your Mr. Noble has ever so kindly informed me that if I hurt you he'll hunt me down."

The look of surprise on Melody's face would have been comical, if it wasn't so genuine. "He-He did? I mean, he shouldn't have—threatening people is never—and I mean, if you'd wanted me dead already you would have left me in the arena! And he's not my Mr. Noble. He's not my anything."

"Sure he isn't." Smirking at Melody as she splutters, Noh adds, "I told him basically that exact same thing, about leaving you in the arena. I also informed him that I'll be teaching you how to shoot that gun while we're here; it's absolutely criminal, you not knowing at least how to defend yourself somehow. Not all of us can be as foolishly lucky as he is."

"Are you sure Noh? Really properly sure? You wouldn't mind teaching me?"

Noh scoffs at her. "Of course I'm sure. I can't be around all the time to protect you, and neither can John. I should probably teach you some basic defense moves as well, because you might not have your gun around all the time either . . ."

They spill out into the main hallway; one by one the people around them stop what they're doing as they catch sight of Melody. There's then a rustle of movement as they all touch their fingers to their forehead. "Er," Melody says, wishing they would stop, "yes." Awkwardly head bobbing, she mimics the gesture back at them. There's a murmur of approval from the onlookers; slowly, everyone goes back to what they were doing before.

"You," Noh announces suddenly from beside her, "need to go back to sleep. You've only had what, three hours? Four?" She begins to steer Melody in the direction of the living quarters.

"Three," Melody admits. "Then John wanted me to come with him to interrogate Ian, which I suppose is a good thing, because I don't think Ian would have been released otherwise, and Ian needs to go do things that involve him aggravating John in hospitals and I'm pretty sure he started that prophecy about me, the jerk." There's a pause. "Why _isn't _un-handcuff a word?"

"I have absolutely no idea."

* * *

After threatening him with bodily harm if he was lying and intended to hurt the universe, the TARDIS, or Melody, John hands Ian the coordinates. "I can't make head or tails of it," he admits ruefully, scratching the back of his head. "There seems to be some sort of interlaying pattern to it, some sort of code, but I can't puzzle it out, which is puzzling in and of itself, because, well, I'm me."

_Leave it to Dad for humility_, Ian thinks wryly.

Rolling his eyes, Ian takes the coordinates from him. _At least the presence of Noh explains how the coordinates got into my pocket in the first place_, he muses, _although why she is even _here_ is anyone's guess. Tricky of her, pretending to find something in my pocket to actually give it to me. Seven points for style, although the execution could have been better timed._

He give the coordinates a quick once over. Ah. Of course John wasn't able to read it. Obvious, when you know to look for it: every single coordinate flipped round, and then a appearing on the side telling him where he needs to go. Leave it to Anita to use a coding system only the two of them would know.

"It's because its psychic paper programed to respond only to my brain's wavelengths," Ian explains to him. "Didn't it occur to you to sonic the paper? The readings should have showed it to be psychic paper at the very least."

"Of course I thought to sonic it," John grumps. Whipping out the sonic from the coat pocket, he gives the coordinates a quick once over. Flipping open the cache, he looks at the readings, says, "See, I just soniced it, and you're right, this appears to be psychic paper."

"Of course," Ian says blandly, tucking away the coordinates into his pockets.

At John's noise of protest, Ian informs him that for his information, the coordinates were in his pocket to begin with. Besides (although he doesn't tell his father this, of course) Ian has a prophecy to go spread about a certain Mrs. Noble. That should be fun, although the next thing on the list, simply labeled as _Snowmen_, hardly looks promising. Ian highly doubts it's a reference to Icey the Snowman.

* * *

It takes two weeks for the government to topple. In the interim, Melody is kept so busy she hardly sees John. Most of her time is spent either doing promo videos for the government or working with Noh on learning how to shoot a gun. It was exhausting work; sometimes to get away from it all Melody would sneak back into the TARDIS, and curl up among the veins of her in the swing under the console, and most times fall asleep. Her guards (because she had guards now, two Darkoll women who were very nice, and an Injall man who never cracked a smile) would wait outside; the TARDIS unnerved them, they said.

_I don't know what they have to be unnerved about, _the TARDIS grumps. _I'm only a concept across the fourth dimension; nothing strange about that._

_Keep telling yourself that dear._

Sometimes John will show up, too, and in between a pot of tea and some leftover biscuits found in the tin in the kitchen, he'll share what's happening "on the ground," as he puts it, and Melody will tell him about her shooting lessons and how surprisingly difficult it was being a poster girl. "I wish I could go out and do things with you," she complains one day. "It's boring being stuck here, no matter how busy it is."

"You could sneak out you know. Put on one of the guards's uniforms—those helmets completely cover their faces—hop down with the transport group I'm in, help dismantle the arenas, galvanize the people."

Melody bites her lip, tempted. "But I'm needed here. I'm helping with tactics, too, planning out the missions that you go on." She pokes John in the side. "Although once we're done with this you'd better take me somewhere nice where I can actually run around chasing monsters and things. I deserve it."

John laughs at her. "That you do. Say, I'll tell you what: how about we go visit Florence? Seventeenth, eighteenth century? I've heard they have some lovely restaurants, and girls like to dress up for that sort of thing. You could, um, wear a dress."

"Only if there are, I dunno, sexy fish vampires involved. Love the running."

John chokes on his tea. Hacking, he rasps, "There are _what _involved?"

"Oh, just an adventure Mum and Dad went on with the Doctor back when they were engaged. There were sexy fish vampires involved."

"You mean the Amy and Rory in the other universe."

Melody gives him an odd look. "That's what I said."

"Right," John sighs, even though she hadn't said that at all. It isn't worth the argument. "But sexy fish vampires? This is a story I absolutely have to hear. So spill."

"Careful John—your Donna's showing."

"Oi! Shut it you. Story time. Now. And in return, I'll tell you about the time I meet the Emperor of Clabrax. A rather nice bloke; he still owes me fifty quid, though. Don't suppose I'll get it back now, what with different universes and all."

* * *

Melody hugs Noh tightly. "Are you sure you don't want a lift?" she asks her, pulling back to eye her friend. "John wouldn't mind. He's said as much."

They're standing next to the lift that will take Noh and a few others topside; the Darkoll king had been captured two days ago, his regime dismantled. And now that Noh wasn't a Declared Public Enemy anymore, she could go home.

"I need to get back to my team," Noh confesses. "I was able to make contact with them to let them know I was alright, but they can't go back to the university without me. And I'd like to see my husband straight away, and you and John aren't leaving till tomorrow, while my team is leaving today." With a grin she adds, "And who knows—with that machine of yours you two could end up anywhere, anywhen. I'm not taking my chances."

"Fair enough." Melody looks around; besides the few other people loading up the lift, the hangar was mostly empty. "I wonder where John is," she muses. "He said he'd be here to send you off."

Noh laughs. "Well, he's always late. I'm not holding my breath." Shouldering her duffel bag over her shoulder, Noh adds in an undertone, "Those creatures you talked about . . . if you ever need help come find me at Luna University. I'm sure the library will have records about them somewhere, even if they're unaware of it."

"I will. Thanks, Noh."

Louder now, Noh adds, "Remember to practice your kicks on your left side. I don't care if they're a pain; one day it might save your life. And keep up target practice. Ask the TARDIS to set something up for you."

"I will."

John running toward them, pea coat halfway on, interrupts their goodbye. "Doctor Jones!" he cries. "I thought I was running late. Good. You're still here." Melody helps him the rest of the way into his pea coat; once that's completed, John holds out his hand to shake. Noh takes it, amused by his formality.

"Take care of yourself, Doctor Jones," he says stiffly. Noh's mouth curls into a smile.

"You too. Take care of her, you hear? There's only one of her."

"Of course!" He slings an arm over Melody's shoulders. "She's my buddy; I won't let anything happen to Melody."

"Right."

Another round of hugs on Melody's part, and then with a final wave Noh is gone. Melody sighs; John puts his arm around her again, holds her close. "Partings are always sad," he says. "Even when they're happy ones."

"Yeah," Melody agrees. "They are."

"C'mon," John says, steering them around. "I heard they have pudding in the dining room."

"Actual pudding or something vaguely resembling pudding that is actually innards."

"Ahm. I have absolutely no idea. Let's find out. You'll never hear me say I wasn't willing to eat food."

"But if it's innards I'm giving it to you, no matter how much of a delicacy it may be."

"Fine by me darling. Fine by me."

* * *

"Madame Karo?" The voice is young, and has a strange lilt to its accent, as if it was being translated slightly off. Karo, her dark skin lined and careworn from her recent grief, looks from her washing. She promptly drops her husband's shirt back into the wash, because Carlil-ibar curse it, it's _her._

"Fire for Hair," Karo gasps, "what are you doing here?!" Her mouth immediately pops open in horror, because that is _no _way to talk to the symbol of her people, but the girl stops her with a "Please, don't. My name is Melody. I'm—I'm here to talk to talk about your son, Jarn."

"My Jarn?" Karo's voice cracks. Her Jarn, who had been thieved out of his body to be put into the games—what would Mrs. Noble have to do with him? Karo and her husband had searched every channel they could on the local holo-vid, every arena trying to find him. But there were so many it was near impossible.

"Yes," Mrs. Noble acknowledges, voice low. "He was in the arena with me. I'd—I'd like to talk to you and your husband?"

"My husband Tamush, yes."

"You and Tamush about—about how brave he was."

"Yes," Karo says, faint; she clutches the edge of the washbasin for support. The water slushes around the empty tin hollow; Tamush's shirt floats on the surface like something wet and dead, the suds gathering about the broken creases of his shirt like bones. "Yes, I'll call him." And then because she can't leave her standing out in the cracked chicken scrawl dirt of her yard, with its barb wire fence and broken regulator, Karo leads Mrs. Noble inside, offers her a cup of water, and collects her husband. They listen to the story of their son's death, and despite everything her heart swells to hear of how brave he had been, even to the end.

Her brave little boy.

* * *

"So Melody, where to next? Now that we have that shindig out of the way and ooh. Never saying that again."

"Ugh, I could sleep for a week. Anyway, you promised me Florence, remember?"

"Ah yes. Florence—wizard idea! So after you get a proper night's sleep—"

"And you too. I know for a fact you were doing extra reconnaissance missions for the resistance."

"—fine, and me too. Spoilsport. After sleeping and breakfast and mm, eggs sound lovely. No, no, not just eggs, hm, maybe a quiche? Quiches? Do you like quiches?"

"John."

"Right. Mm. Florence. Sounds smashing. Ooh. Never saying that again either. Absolutely rubbish, smashing, and when you get right down to it, it doesn't make much sense—why would you want to smash something that you find interesting enough to comment on? And very much not the point. I think quiche sounds wizard. Yes. I shall make quiche."

And the bright red box tumbles out of the world and into the stars.


	22. inside these empty streets

**A/N: Unbeta'd. Sorry. I'll get Phoenix on it tomorrow. Also sorry for the month wait. College. Also also, John hijacked the plot. I'm mostly sorry for that, because he's being a stubborn, noble idiot. But also the wait; I am glad to say that we are now officially back to our regularly scheduled programming. EDIT: Beta'd. ~madis**

* * *

"This is all your fault!" he informs her.

"_My _fault?!" Melody shrieks. The door buckles in, wood splintering; she throws herself against it, keeping it closed. They slam slam slam on the other side of the door—animalistic intelligence, iron controlled ferocity. Bloodthirsty. "How is this _my _fault?!"

"I don't know, but it is! Now shut up, I'm trying to think!"

"I hate you sometimes."

"No you don't. Now shut it!"

* * *

_Thirty Minutes Ago_

It's more of a crevice than an alley, really. It opens out into a street with a dead end on the other side. Whatever stones that had been cobbled together in an attempt to quell the mud and the damp had sunk into the ground long ago, leaving a long line of refuse, limp white grass, and mold sliming up the tilted brick walls. Wind howls down the hollow lines of the alleyway, rattling the edges of the buildings closer together and shivering the limp grass. With a wheezing groan the TARDIS materializes at the end of the alleyway, her bright red lines thickening as she pulls through space-time. There's barely enough room for her to cram her bulk in; she manages with an extra lurch to the side, her walls scraping red along the slimed brick.

The people in the street beyond don't even notice this new curiosity, tucked away into a vein of the city; there's a moment's pause, as the TARDIS hums out into the temporal field around her, testing to make sure she's in the right when.

John flings the TARDIS doors open, arms wide. His shoes squelch into the mud. "I present to you . . . Florence!" he proclaims, then glances frowning down at his shoes. "Eugh. This is definitely not the better side of town."

Melody pops her head out after him, looks around, eyebrows raised. "This isn't Florence."

Shoes slipping to find purchase in the muck, he turns towards her, frowning. "How do _you _know?"

"Braveheart told me. That's the advantage of having a two-way telepathic circuit inside my head when I'm with her—I get all the good stuff. Thanks dear." She pats the frame of the TARDIS as she squelches into the mud after John, pulling the door shut behind her.

"Did you _really_ have to bring your gun along with you?" he complains, catching sight of it attached to the holster on her hip.

Melody gives him a look. "We're somewhere in Venice, I believe," she says archly, grinning at him as she straightens the lapels of her jean jacket. "Sometime in the Eighteenth Century? And who knows—maybe we'll run into some fish vampires after all. I'd like to not die, if it comes to that. Ergo, gun. But don't worry; I'll let you reason with them first."

* * *

Two of them tail John and Melody for the first few blocks after they'd left the little alley behind for the great city of Venice. The first few streets they'd strolled down had been curiously empty. Out of the corner of her eye Melody can see John's brows lifting higher and higher, even as he'd chattered away and swung their clasped hands between them. "Something's wrong," he announces finally. He can't stop the grin that spreads across his face. "Isn't this _exciting?" _he squeaks, glancing behind him in the process. "A full blown mystery—deserted streets, closed shutters, tangled laundry left out on the line to mold, vampires stalking us from behind."

_"What?!" _ Melody gasps. She twists to look behind her; John tugs her around again, hissing, "They don't know I've noticed yet. They've been trailing us for the last few minutes; I assume they're vampires because they've been avoiding the sun, keeping to the shadows, but that could be any a number of things. Very pretty, pale skin, possible perception filter—I haven't ruled out fish vampires quite yet—and there's a species classified on Hamovarian that looks suspiciously similar, but vampires! Aaaand they've noticed us noticing them. We should run."

He takes off. Melody is jerked behind him like a kite pulled tumbling along the ground. She stumbles, caught on the end of his arm, bobbles forward. She catches up after that, almost outstrips him. There's an audible hiss from behind them as the vampire-possible-aliens caught on. "Run, run, run, run," John chants under his breath as they careen around the corner, nearly knocking into an overturned cart of rotted fruit. He vaults over it, dragging Melody after him; she is suddenly fiercely glad she'd thought to wear tennis shoes today. The vampires crash into the cart far mere seconds after; by the sound of splintering wood they completely demolish the cart.

Fruit splatters into Melody's hair and down her back. She shrieks. "Fast blighters, aren't they?!" John howls, grinning madly. "They're just toying with us—they could have caught up long ago if they'd wanted to. In we go."

He changes directions on a dime, charging into the house next to them, throwing the door shut behind them, and bolting the heavy wooden crossbeam against the door. "Shut the shutters!" he'd yells, already running to the back of the pub (because it is very obviously a pub, with tables and chairs and a bar with tankards lined up on the dusty wood) and shutting the door to the kitchen.

Melody does as she is told. There are two ground floor windows. One of the vampires is already trying to force his way through the window; the brick wall cracks around his shoulders, giving way. When he catches sight of Melody his face changes to a leer—hungry.

Melody slams the shutters into his face. Twice.

With a shriek the vampire falls back and she's able to close the shutters the rest of the way. She turns around to find John taking care of the other window by throwing a white powder into the other vampire's face, who is a woman with long blonde hair. She gives way, clutching at her face and screaming in agony.

John heaves his pair shutters closed and proceeds to throw the white powder at the shuttered window. "Sodium chloride!" he calls out cheerfully to Melody as he trots around her to coat the rest of the front door and the other window with the substance. "Can't believe that worked! Wonder what their biological make-up is that they'd react to common _salt. _Rules out about ten theories I had though, so that's nice. Scientific method—absolutely wizard!"

He shoves the tin at Melody. "Would you go cover the entry leading to the kitchen and the stairs with this? I need to be extremely clever and find a way to get us out. Maybe I'll have something in my pockets besides a tin of salt. That would be extremely helpful, self."

By the time Melody finishes coating the back entry, the stairs, and the front entry points again with salt (like most things in her life now, the tin is bigger on the inside), John had set up shop at one of the abandoned tables. He'd emptied his pockets to try and find Jack's vortex manipulator, littering the table and the floor with a slinky, some jacks, three volumes of poetry, the ninth book of _Harry Potter,_ a giant green-and-white umbrella with a wooden vulture's head for a handle, several empty wineglasses, and a small velvet box. He's now trying to sonic the manipulator into some semblance of working order. Melody sits down next to him on the other chair, moving an empty wine glass and the ninth _Harry Potter _to the floor. It had grown quiet outside; while she worked on reinforcing the stairs John had reassured her that they were probably out gathering more recruits.

Lovely.

"I wonder what happened to everyone else," Melody breathes, glancing around her. The streets had been deserted, except for her and John and the vampires, as was the pub. "This isn't right. I don't remember any vampire invasions happening in history class."

"Mm."

"And they can't have blamed it on the plague, that was years ago."

"Mhm."

"I also think I'm going to go bathe in barbeque sauce and walk around outside after the sun's gone down."

The whirr of the sonic stops. He raises an eyebrow to find her smirking at him. "That was in very bad taste," he informs her.

"It worked didn't it?"

"Still." He sighs, sets the manipulator down on the table to look at her. "Things fall through the world sometimes. It just happens. History, literature. Memory." He shrugs. "Who'm I to say that we haven't done something—that we won't do something—to negate this from history? Vampires in Venice, though . . . it's a bit of a stretch that history doesn't remember, not even a lie."

"Do you think it's the cracks, echoing through this universe?"

He rubs his eyes, pushing his glasses off the bridge of his nose. "Naaah. Not unless Braveheart decides to explode anytime soon—and I wouldn't allow her to, come to that. But—but _him _coming through. The Doctor. It shouldn't affect our universe like that. So it's not him."

"Well what then?" Melody demands. "Why don't we remember?"

Lips pursed, he shakes his head. "I—I honestly don't know. But someone besides me has been messing with time—and I intend to find out whom."

* * *

Opening the shutters, John sticks his head out of one of the windows. "Hello! Hell-_oh. _Hello, hello, hello. Hellllloh. It sounds different every time you say it. Brilliant! Ahm, right. Sorry. Hel-_ack." _He's pulled inside by the back of his coat just as the first vampire lunges for his face. Melody chucks a handful of salt in the vampire's face; it's a different one from before. Those two are still there, faces pock-marked with burns from the salt. Besides them and the one who is screaming and clawing at his face, there are two others, both older. One of them is fat and balding and quite close to the building; Melody hurls salt at him, too, before she slams the shutters shut.

"I don't they're quite willing to negotiate!" Melody shrieks at him, instinctively ducking as the vampires assault the door and shutters. Hands break through the wood, shredding it. Melody starts hurling handfuls of salt at the intruding horde.

Completely calm, John brushes dirt off his coat. "Thank you Melody. How odd. They must've degenerated—ate everyone up in this section of the city, burned out their own resources. They've become almost feral." He scowls. "They certainly know to gather reinforcements though. So not completely feral."

"_John. A little help please."_

"This is all your fault!" he informs her.

"_My _fault?!" Melody shrieks. The door buckles in, wood splintering; she throws herself against it, keeping it closed. They slam slam slam on the other side of the door—animalistic intelligence, iron controlled ferocity. Bloodthirsty. "How is this _my _fault?!"

"I don't know, but it is! Now shut up, I'm trying to think!"

"I hate you sometimes."

"No you don't. Now shut it! I'm trying to figure this out." Going over to the table, he begins to cram his things back into his pockets. "You might as well come over and help me gather my things." He crams the umbrella back into his pocket; the vulture head sticks out of the pocket to glare at the proceedings. He turns to her holding the poetry in one hand and the slinky in the other. "I need to get a proper look at them anyway, because you pulled me back in before I had the chance. Thanks for that, by the way. Would've died. I have a theory, but for that I need them to break the wall down. So if you could help me pack . . ." He nods his head to indicate the things still left on the table.

Keeping one eye on the cracking wall and her hand in the tin of salt, Melody scuttles over to John. One handed, she hands him the small velvet box and the ninth _Harry Potter. _Putting the book inside his left pocket and the box in his right, he snatches the vortex manipulator off the table, straps it around Melody's wrist.

"Hey!" Startled, she jerks back, spills the salt over their arms.

"Don't fuss." He gives the manipulator one last burst with his sonic, grabs the salt from her. "Now Melody," he says, punches in the coordinates, lets go of her arm.

* * *

She's thrown back through space-time, fizzing like the crackle of your leg falling asleep after sitting on it too long, white noise through until she lands rolling on someone's carpet. Her gun digs into her hip. For a moment she simply lies there, arm trapped underneath her, hair frizzing out into her face.

She hates him. Hates hates hates him. Will continue to hate him for the rest of eternity.

The carpet smells thick, like must and ash, and (as she squints open one eye to check) is a heavy red-gold monstrosity embroidered all over with flowers. A rug then. She rolls over, groaning, only to meet John's face as he stares at her wide-eyed from the top end of a bed, an equally undressed woman beside him. Only it wasn't John at all, and at least they had sheets over themselves, so that's two alright things on a long list of Not-Okay-At-All.


	23. casanova romances a woman

**A/N: For the wait: again, college. Homework. To be specific, English major, so lots of essays. But it is finished and voila! Beta'd by the lovely Phoenix. ~madis**

* * *

Giacomo Casanova: romantic, lover of women. She can't stop staring at him. At both of them. Together. Because Henriette's blonde and beautiful, because out of some cruel twist of genetics Casanova has John's face. Or John has his. Casanova is slightly thinner, slightly younger, with lighter hair, a soft ash brown instead of John's dark chestnut. And his eyes, all wrong—pale, blue water, marble-glass eyes instead of John's vibrant green.

She can't stop staring.

His face's so alien because it's so, so familiar, and so foreign. Seeing the Doctor as John hadn't been much of a shock as this; she had been halfway expecting it then, had dreamed of the metacrisis before she'd ever even met him.

But this?

She isn't sure how to react, how to look at them both without thinking of John and Rose, together. So she focuses on the task at hand, pacing, pacing, explaining to the pair what happened, trying to figure out why there are vampires on the city streets.

Anything but John.

Anything but Rose.

(Except they're all she can think about.)

* * *

After the first startled exclamation of Melody trying to explain just who, exactly, she is and no, no, don't call for help, there's a fair bit of explaining. "I'm a friend," she tells them, "I'm a friend!"

"If you're a friend why are you barging in here for?" Casanova shouts back. "We were busy!" Which started that right off.

She manages to forestall them long enough to listen, to explain. Talk fast enough (great big gob that's me, never let me talk) and you can forestall quite a number of things. _As per Doctor specifications, _Melody can't help but think wryly, which can't but help make her think of John, so off that topic.

She doesn't tell them all of it, of course. Not about Rose, or that John looks like his Venetian counterpart, or that they were actually trying to get to Florence in a magic red box. No: just that she and her friend were walking through town and had been attacked by vampires. She checks their reaction to "vampire;" there is none, so presumably the idea of vampire is old hat.

How far into the future did that idiot send her? At least it wasn't out of the century, judging by Casanova.

Small consolation, if any.

She concludes with her friend being the noble idiot and telling her to run, that she had run, had been chased by vampires. Better to be seen as a coward than explaining about vortex manipulators. Stumbling upon the window, she'd climbed through to escape the vampires chasing her, and voila! Here she was, explaining something to them when she really should be out looking for her idiot friend.

"The window," Casanova repeats incredulously. He glances at the window in question, then the spot where Melody landed on the rug (which both he and Henriette, Casanova's paramour, were carefully not stepping on), then at Melody herself. There was a good five feet between the window and where Melody had landed.

Melody has the grace to blush.

They'd moved from the bed and Melody from the rug to chairs around the low-banked fire, which was huddled on the far end of the room from the bed. Melody paces around and around the chairs, the rug thick under her feet. It extended to this side of the room, nearly covered the floor. After Melody had lied by telling most of the truth, Henriette had slipped on a robe and gone down to order three coffees from the kitchen; Casanova had mercifully put on a night-shirt and breeches.

"We're on the second story," Casanova adds.

Melody paces back round the other way. "I was _very _frightened."

"You also took the time to latch the window behind you."

She paces, paces. How far into the future did John send her? "Yes, well, I didn't want the vampires coming in after me. I'm very practical when frightened."

Casanova sighs and accepts the lie for what it is. "Look, can you at least stop pacing? It makes me nervous when people move about like that. At least sit down. Henriette is bringing us coffee, which is quite wonderful stuff from the East somewhere, and just—just sit down. Please." He grabs her arm in passing, places her in an armchair beside him. Melody sits there, hands twisting twisting in her lap because _how far into the future did he send her? _

She doesn't know what to do. She doesn't know how to save John, or how to explain to these people just what exactly needs to be done to go save John. She doesn't even know how far into the future she is, or if she was even sent into the future at all. It could as well have been the past.

She looks at Casanova at that. "What year is this?" she asks him.

Casanova raises an eyebrow at her. Obviously he's wondering if she is crazy. He replies, "1754. Why?"

"Oh, no reason. Couldn't remember in the fright, that's all."

Melody tries to remember what year the TARDIS had told her she'd dropped them off at; she couldn't remember any specific dates, only mid-Eighteenth century and Venice, not Florence, Melody Williams will let my John know.

The TARDIS.

It will be a start, at least, to try and find her. But there were the vampires to deal with, and going during the daytime wouldn't help, because she and John and ran into said vampires during the daytime, and nighttime would be even worse and of course Braveheart had to park herself in the worst spot imaginable, right in the middle of the vampire-infested lower city.

She _would_ throw them right into the adventure like that; how quintessential of her.

Per Casanova and Henriette, the vampires had come two months ago. No one was sure how, or where—they'd just started biting people, the infected turning on one another when the uninfected fled the lower city. "Venice is easy to defend internally," Casanova had explained. "We break down the bridges, trap them on islands between the canals—for some reason they can't cross running water."

Which ruled out fish vampires.

The surrounding cities had left Venice to fend for herself; since she was a trade city, she was rapidly running out of food. The situation, Casanova informed Melody dryly, was dire.

Melody tries to ignore how many holes the explanation of vampires put into her story of how she got into Giacomo Casanova's house. Unlike River, she's never been much of a liar.

"You must care about him very much." Melody jumps, startled. She looks up from her hands to find Casanova regarding her curiously. "Your friend," he adds. "You care for him."

"Oh yes, I do. With all my heart. I've known him all my life, but I only met him a month ago—and he's my friend. My best friend. And I mean—he might not see me in the same light; he has lots of friends back home where he's from. Sarah Jane. Donna. Amy—no, not Amy, he never met her. Barbara and Ian. Romana. Melanie Bush. R-Rose. But even so. Even so, I should have known better by now. I should have known what he was going to do. It's just like him to do something so nobly idiotic. Although he probably has something up his sleeve. A way out. He always does."

"You love him."

Melody stares at him. Casanova raises an eyebrow at her in response, crossing his legs towards the fire in the grate. Her immediate response is of course she did. Of course she loves John, like she loves Braveheart and (maybe) Ian. But by the expression on his face, Melody knows Casanova meant _romantically._

Attached.

Together.

_Love._

"Of course I don't," she tells him. "Not like that."

Casanova snorts. "Yeah, sure, and I have a mild affection for my Henriette." He leans forward, body angled towards her. Lacing his fingers together, he adds, "Let me explain something to you. Before my Henriette I was wild. Women are delicate and rare and very, very beautiful—but I wanted all of the beauty, and not just one. But then came my Henriette. She was a cracker; refused to put up with my romancing. That's what attracted me to her, of course. And I am stubborn, and as you can see," he gestures around him, "she was won over by my charming tenacity. The way I feel about her is the way you are worried about your Jonathan."

"John."

"John. Your John, yes. You love him."

"No I don't."

"But the problem remains: does he love you back?" At that, Melody can't look at him. "Ah," he sighs, clasps her hands in both of his. "For that, Miss Williams, I am sorry."

Desperate to change the subject, Melody asks, "How long have you known Henriette?"

At that Casanova's face draws curiously blank. He pulls back from her, looks towards the fire. "Always. Always. I've always known her."

Melody frowns. That didn't ring true to the story he'd just told her. Before she can ask him about it, though, Henriette comes back in with the coffee. She'd piled her hair up onto her head, secured it with a hair pin; in one smooth move Casanova lets go of Melody's hand and grabs Henriette by the waist, pulling her to him. "Don't you remember? I like your hair down," he says, laughing. She laughs, twists out of his grip; he merely pulls her back in again, sits her down on his lap to press a kiss on the side of her neck.

Melody looks away, twists her fingers in her lap. Twist, twist. She can't feel it, of course, but the repetitive motion soothes her.

"Giac," Henriette protests, half-laughing, "we have a guest!"

"When has that ever stopped us before?"

"Still." He lets her go; she hands him his mug. "Now drink your coffee like a good boy." She kisses his cheek, hands the second coffee to Melody before setting down her own on a low end table. Melody stares into her mug; the liquid inside is thick, turgid. She shivers into the steam rising from the coffee, rests her head for a moment on the ceramic lid.

When she looks up again Henriette has a gun pointed in her face.

_Why do people always seem to have guns?_ Melody wonders wearily, takes a gulping hot sip of her coffee.

That, too, is becoming very old hat.


	24. fractures in the space-time

Henriette's voice is routine as she reads out Melody's rights. Casanova is quite literally frozen; a thin electric current runs over his entire body, rendering him immobile. Melody can just see it out of the corner of her eye.

"Under Article 5-G of the Shadow Proclamation, byway 9, I, Agent Markor, place you under arrest. Anything you say will be used against you in a court of law."

"What—" Melody has to clear her throat before continuing; she can't seem to look around the gun. As old hat as guns are, that doesn't mean that the old hat is a comfortable fit or even vaguely stylish. She's surprised that she can still speak, and not rendered into immobility like Casanova. "What did you do to him?"

"Giac?" Henriette—Agent Markor—raises an eyebrow. As if suggesting the fact that she'd do anything to hurt Casanova I a personal offence. "He'll be fine. It's simply an electromagnetic current running through his body from a tracker I implemented quite some time ago. Don't want him getting away and doing anything stupid."

She goes and sits down in the chair opposite Melody. Keeping the gun pointed in Melody's direction, she grabs her mug of coffee, takes a sip. "Go on," she says. "It's not poisoned. I want to arrest you, not murder you. Well, not yet."

Melody takes a sip of the coffee. It's too hot and burns her tongue; it scalds the back of her throat as she swallows. No sugar, and she doesn't like cream in her coffee anyways. Thick and black, like this entire situation. The gun is a Mark 5 Ion Cluster. Sleek, efficient, doesn't leave a mess to clean up. 48th century. The part of her brain that remembers the dreams shuts up as she takes another scalding gulp of the coffee.

"Can I ask what I'm under arrest for?" she asks. "Or am I not supposed to know."

"The Justice Department is supposed to inform you of your crimes; we're just supposed to bag and tag you. But I don't suppose there's any harm with you knowing now—I would like to finish my coffee before I call in the other agents and hands _on _the mug please." The gun is immediately up again, pointing in Melody's direction. Melody freezes; so much for trying to grab her gun. She places her hand back on the ceramic mug and for want of something better to do takes another sip of coffee.

"Please know I _will _shoot you if you try anything," Henriette continues pleasantly. Her gaze is steel amiability.

She's not bluffing.

* * *

Melody Williams has caused multiple paradoxes involving the Torchwood Institute, including circumventing her own death.

Melody Williams will be taken into custody by the Agency and transferred to the Justice Department's holding facilities until the time of her death. She will then be taken to the Torchwood Institute and she will die, as per the fixed timeline. There will be no alterations or circumventions; everything clean and smooth sailing.

Melody Williams and Doctor John Foreman, should he be found, are responsible for the corruption and expulsion of one of their top agents, class number 789, alias Ian Noble. He is now considered rogue and, if captured, will be put to trial for his crimes, which are classified.

Both of the offending parties are also responsible for the death of Agent 47, alias Jack Harkness, alias Grayson Smith. He is unaware of this fact, since it is in his future. The Agency's records, however, are extensive and outside the boundaries of conventional time. His records are sealed.

Melody Williams struggles to remember how to breathe. "My _death?" _she manages at last. "How? When?"

"That information is classified," Henriette says smoothly. She appraises Melody, one eyebrow raised, half-smirking. Drains the last of her coffee. Melody's has gone stone cold by now.

"But that can't be just it," Melody protests. "That can't—just because I try and prevent my own death doesn't mean that you can arrest me. I haven't tried to yet so technically haven't done anything wrong."

"My dear girl, don't you understand? You've already done it. For the Agency, you've already succeeded. That's why the vampires are here. That's why there are a million other tiny fractures across time, mucking about with history. Because _you _circumvented around your own death. And the only way to fix those millions of tiny fractures is to make sure that you die. Simple, really."

For a moment Melody can't say anything. Her voice is small and frightened when she says, "The vampires are my fault?"

Henriette stares at her, eyes hooded. The gun gleams fire silver in the light of the dying fire in the hearth. The shadows thrown up are dark hooded masses. _Don't blink, _Melody can't help but think, feeling somewhat hysterical. She was going to die. Fantastic.

"Yes, they are," Henriette says. "Twenty-seven agents were integrated into this timeline as soon as the vampires started appearing through space-time. We partially isolated Venice from the timeline, kept the world at large from noticing the state she's in. As soon as anyone leaves they forget about the ruin that this city has become." She stands, moves around the room to stand by her lover, gun still on Melody. "My poor Giac here, along with every inhabitant in this city, will forget all about this as soon as the fracture closes. Life isn't fair. But I have you now, so my job here is done. So he'll forget about me a little sooner than the rest of the city will forget about vampires."

She presses a kiss into his temple. Wide-eyed, he stares at her, has stared at her for the last half-hour, her and only her, his mouth still fixed in a half-smile as he raises the mug to his lips. "I'm sorry my love," she tells him, and in this, at least, she is sincere. "I am so, so sorry. But it was my job. Not the falling in love bit, but all the rest of it. The falling in love was a bit of an accident." She gives him a half smile, raises the gun, shoots near Melody's feet. Melody drops the mug.

_"What did I tell you about not moving?"_ Hanriette snarls, turning on her. Melody freezes, hands in the air. Moving around Casanova's chair to the center of the room and keeping the gun trained on her, Henriette reaches up to press a communication device in her ear. "Captain? I've got her."

Melody's blood runs hot, then cold.

Captain?

No.

No no no. Not him. He'd died. John told her he died.

_Will have died, _Melody thinks, sick. _She said will have died. _

Henriette listens into her comm-link for a moment longer, nodding. "Yes sir," she says at last. "I understand." She clicks off the two way communication, moves towards Melody. There's a scorch mark on the floor from where Henriette had shot at her.

"Time to bring you in," Henriette informs her, reaches for Melody's arm. Melody shies away, tumbling off the couch. She scrambles for the door; there's a _blam, _followed by heat whizzing past Melody's arm and into the rug. The smell of burning flesh stinks the air. Melody almost falls with the sudden onslaught of pain, but keeps on going.

_She can't kill me. She can't kill me. She needs me alive . . ._

The door to the room slams open. Melody has the brief impression of combat boots and jeans before there's a cracking flash of light followed by a thud. Melody blinks the spots out of her eyes, finds John helping her to her feet with her bad arm. She cries out, yanks her arm back, and slaps him.

"I suppose I deserve that," he says.

"Yes, you did."


	25. bullet-proof

Melody glares at him. "What the _hell_ were you thinking?"

"Darling, I doubt this is the time, so shut up." He moves around her, kneeling briefly to check Henriette's vitals before going to Casanova. She lies crumpled on the floor, unconscious; he kicks her gun away before announcing she'll be fine, the tazer didn't do anything at all other than knock her unconscious, a few hours and a headache later and she'll be fine, isn't it great that he had a tazer in his pocket to knock her out with? He's rambling, adjusting the frequency settings on his sonic to match the magnetization holding Casanova in place. "This is really, really weird," he informs him, "because I have the same face as you. Or you as me. Complicated. It'd be kinder of me to leave you here, have them erase your memory of this ever happening. But I can't do that."

"What do you mean it isn't the time."

John turns on his heels, points the sonic at her. "Any second now Time Agents about to storm this place and imprison you, me, erase good ol' selfie here's memories and make sure that you die, and you are not going to die, so shut. Up." With one last _bzzrt _of the sonic he frees Casanova, who immediately lurches towards the still form of Henriette. John grabs him by the shoulders, hauls him back. Casanova fights grim and silent, beating John about the shoulders.

"Let me go to her," he rasps. "Let me go to her."

"Henriette is dead," John barks. "She never existed to begin with. And unless you want to forget her, you'll come with us." He forces Casanova still, gripping his upper arms and shaking him. They're the same height, Melody can't help but notice. The same height.

"They will scoop out all you remember of her." Casanova makes another bid for freedom; John hauls him back again. Their forms are half eaten by the shadows created by the dying fire. John snarls, "No, no, _listen to me._ It will be like she'd never existed at all. And that is far worse than being dead. _Listen to me. _If you decide to stay I will not stop you, but Henriette will be gone. Gone, and you'll never be able to see her again, no matter how much you want to. I know what it's like. I know, a dozen times over. And I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry."

With a savage twist Casanova breaks free. He stumbles away from John, away from Henriette. "No," he rasps. "There has to be another option."

John puts his hands in his pockets. "I'm sorry, but there isn't. You heard that conversation. Henriette is a time agent. It was just pretend. That's what they do, pretend."

Casanova shakes his head. He kneels down next to Henriette, touches her blonde hair. Melody looks away. "If everything else was a lie," he says, "this wasn't. She loved me." He looks up at John. "I know what love is, and that wasn't an act. That wasn't a lie."

He presses a kiss onto Henriette's temple. The windows blow inwards, shards of glass raining everywhere. At the same time, the door to the bedroom slams open. Melody shrieks, shields her face from the flying glass. Heavy boots rattle the floorboards; disoriented by the glass, she half turns, runs right into Agent 47, alias Jack Harkness, alias Grayson Smith.

and for a moment she can't move, can't breathe, can't think can't think can only remember pain because it's him. Her torturer (_tell us where the doctor is don't scream don't cry don't make a sound tell us where the doctor the doctor is and she doesn't and she doesn't tell them she doesn't and he drops acid on her fingers)_ and he's far, far younger than the last time she saw him, as he grappled with John on the console room floor, that Jack had been ancient, but this one is young, could even be working in Rose's employ already, her own personal hound. For a moment they just stand and stare at one another. By the flare of recognition in his eyes she knows that he's met her before, and she knows that it's after for him too, she can see the crook in his nose where John punched him, so she pulls out her gun and she shoots him.

She's amazed that she even remembered to reload the plasma bursts before she went out with John this morning.

The first shot chews into his armor a bright plasma burst green. He's wearing armor so he won't die so she won't create any paradoxes so she shoots him again. He stumbles into the doorframe. The third shot blasts past his head and creates a crater in the hallway wall. Glass shatters around her, and the sound of stamping boots shatters the glass, the agents are coming, are here, and she doesn't know if it's on stun she doesn't care.

"Melody!"

John. Screaming at her to stop.

The fourth shot cracks Jack's shoulder. The doorway props him up now, and he holds his shoulder together with his hand. The stench of metal welded to his shoulder and burnt flesh stinks the air. He throws curses at her as she's tackled to the ground, the gun arrested from her. They bounce off her head, harmless; she closes her eyes as one of the agents cuffs her.

The agent's knee digs into her back. He hauls her to her knees by her cuffs; they bite into her wrists, sharp.

"Agent Markor?" Jack manages to grind out.

"Alive but unconscious, sir."

John 's dropped to his knees beside her. He's arguing frantically with the agent holding him down; it takes Melody longer than it should to realize that he's trying to convince them to not erase Casanova's memories. Finally he addresses Jack directly, who laughs in his face, blood dribbling from the corner of his mouth.

She's glad. She's glad she hurt him.

Melody tries to make eye contact with John, but he won't look at her. They'd allowed Casanova to stay by Henriette. One of the agents, a small, thin woman, loosely holds a gun at her side. Casanova isn't the threat.

There are five agents in total in the room besides Jack and Hanriette; three guard Melody and John, the woman who stands over Casanova, and the last, who peels the doorway off of Jack. "Sir," he says, bracing him up. Jack nods, pats him on the shoulder.

"I'm alright," he says.

Watching him, Melody realizes that the soldier is in love with Jack, that most of the people in the room are probably in love with Jack, and that Jack is taking advantage of that. That's the type of man this Jack Harkness is. Another reason to hate him. She files this information away almost dispassionately, watches him walk towards her. He holds his shoulder together with his good hand; blood drips from the cracks in his armor onto the floor. She stares into his blue eyes and burns through the ice of them because she hates him, hates.

"Captain," she greets him, voice flat.

With his good hand he hits her, cracking into her cheekbone and lower part of her eye with the blood on his hand, splitting open her lip with the second blow. Melody sees stars, slumps back and to the side from the blow. She's kept upright by the grip the Time Agent has on her shoulder.

She blinks the pain out of her eyes, and John is looking at her again, face white. _At least he still cares, _she thinks fuzzily as she tastes the blood from her split lip. Even he hates her for using a gun, at least he still cares.

That's something.


	26. her years of waiting

******A/N: I apologize for the month long wait. Life happened. But I'm here now. We have one more chapter in Venice, and then again we're upwards and onwards. Thanks to everyone for the lovely reviews. Partially beta'd by the lovely PhoenixWormood137; any mistakes are, as always, my own. ~madis**

* * *

The plasma-burn on Melody's arm cramps and twists from having her hands forced back into handcuffs. She and John are dragged to the far side of the room, near the fireplace and, most importantly, away from the door. They're unceremoniously dropped to their knees onto the floor beside the armchairs, and John won't look at her. Melody doesn't know what to do.

Casanova stands trembling in the middle of the room; two agents took his shoulders, pinning him in place. The expression on Casanova's face isn't one of fear. He's angry. One of the agents woke Henriette up with a shot into the side of her neck, possibly adrenaline. Melody isn't sure. Conversing quietly with Jack in the corner, Henriette carefully doesn't look at any of them. Casanova doesn't look away from her, and it's him she refuses to look at most carefully of all. Two more agents came in while Henriette was woken up, bringing two miniature sarls with them. Melody's surprised to see sarls here; the resistance, from what she remembers, had been in the thirty-third century—were sarls common by the fifty-first? These are more streamlined than the one's she's used to, brighter, throwing heavy shadows about the room. The mystery of them is something to focus on rather than John very purposefully not talking to her.

Jack and Henriette break away from one another. Jack props himself up against the settee arm. The agent who Melody had noticed earlier converges in on him, med-kit in hand. She can tell it's a med-kit because of the giant red cross on the side. It was comforting to know that some things wouldn't change. After looking at Henriette for confirmation, who nods at him to _move on with it, man,_ the agent begins to inspect Jack's burnt shoulder. Were both he and Henriette doctors, then? Maybe he wasn't in love with Jack after all; Melody's too tired to care.

(Anything to keep her mind off of John, not talking, not looking, stone walled in his thoughts. He probably hates her.)

Looking impossibly young in her robe and bare feet and her hair tumbling down around her hair pins, Henriette moves towards Casanova. Her gun is tucked into the waistband of her robe, sharp against the soft whiteness of the cloth. She stops by the agent tending Jack and says, "Four seventy-six," and he pauses long enough to say, "Markor," all respect and diffidence, and fill up a syringe full of a pale amber liquid similar to cheap whiskey. Henriette's face turns toward Casanova again, a white death-mask underneath the bones of her face, and her body follows, the syringe in her grip thick and sharp.

"Ah," John says, quiet, so quiet he almost hadn't spoken at all. "I had wondered that. They all have numbers. Markor. Not a name at all."

Melody turns to John to ask him what he means, but the agent cracking the butt of her gun against John's shoulder and barking at him to shut up keeps Melody silent. John's eyes slip along sideways to her, and she's not sure what he's trying to tell her, but she's listening, she's listening. What is he trying to say?

Henriette's steps are small. She drags herself along the path between them until she stops in front of him. The liquid rolls thick around in the hollow glass of the syringe. She and Casanova stare at one another for a moment and Jack watches them, eyes glittering with satisfaction. _It's punishment, _Melody realizes, looking back at the couple in the middle of the room. _For falling in love. It's punishment. _

"Henri," Casanova says, private, so private. Ignoring the two agents pinning him in place, he sways towards her, eyes fixed on the bright coin of her hair.

John swallows, closes his eyes.

He can't look at them.

"Henri. Please." And at least he has a faint of idea of what's about to happen, because he adds, "I don't want to forget. Please. I won't tell. _Please."_

"It's protocol."

They twist him around and he struggles like a fish on a line, slippery in the harsh artificiality of the sarls's light, and all John can think about is roses staring at him, staring as he's twisted on the floor, arrested for being too human and she was the one who called Torchwood, she was the one.

_(my dear lady disdain are you yet living?)_

"Don't," he barks, voice thick, and receives another blow, this one higher up cracking sick and wet against his head. He blinks stars out of his eyes, and Melody beside him is silent as stone, as wind.

Henriette brings the needle up to his neck, primed and ready to push the forgetfulness into his cerebral cortex (the pulse beating at the corner of his jaw which she used to kiss oh so tenderly) and in one fluid movement she pulls the gun from the waistband of her robe left-handed and shoots the sarl, neat and cool as a sealed envelope.

It explodes in a whomp of light and glass, catches up with the second sarl and that explodes too with a second whomp. A hurricane of glass and light and fire rages against dying. It's raining. Melody turns to cover her face, cracks into John's forehead as he does the same.

The room is a confusion of light and the dark of the windows as they explode outward from the sarls flowering and screaming as glass cut into flesh. Melody's bumped out of the room and scrabbled down the stairs before she has the chance to blink any of the sun spots out of her eyes. John scatters in behind her, driving her forward; they knock down into the kitchen and out into the yard, running flat out. Henriette and Casanova are in front of them. The time agent pulls them all along, and her bare feet are cut along the stones of the road as she twists them deeper and deeper into the city, turning and turning, but she's been trained to ignore such things. Melody's arm throbs in counterpoint with her labored breathing, and she follows John blind, the spots obscuring her vision like a bad film reel.

* * *

They stumble through the city, deer in a forest of water and stone. Weary and footsore, they finally stop at a deserted crossroads. The city hasn't woken up yet; all the shutters are still closed, the doors shut in their seals. "You'll take us with you in the TARDIS, out of this city, this time. You'll take us to safety," Henriette demands, face set and white. She clutches Casanova's hand tight, a life line. The one thing she refuses to let go of.

John rubs at his wrists, sonics Melody free of the handcuffs. They've left red marks on her wrists, thick from being jerked around, and he's grateful that he'd remembered to install the perception filter into the manipulator, so the agents wouldn't even think to take it. Grateful, grateful, grateful. Even Melody would have forgotten about the manipulator, in the mess of things. He plucks the manipulator off her easy as anything, secrets it away into his pockets.

"Yes," he says, "yes of course we'll take you," and he rubs his wrists again, pockets the sonic, and follows Henriette down the winding dark into the mausoleum of the cathedral, where they'll wait for dark again before crossing the channels into vampire territory. They huddle amongst the dead, and he sits next to bones as he tries to not listen to Henriette and Melody talking further in, as Agent Markor 3, alias Henriette, of the First Division Medical Fleet, patches up Melody's arm and split lip via a med-kit found in John's coat pockets. He never has a clue how anything gets in there anymore.

Casanova sits beside them, quiet. His eyes never leave her face.

"The cathedral . . . resonates . . . time signature makes it hard to find." Amused, Henriette adds, "Bet you're glad I didn't kill you. I'm a rather good shot." Their conversation filters in and out with the whirr of the sonic. John squints down through his spectacles at the manipulator in his hands. Hmph. He could have told Melody that, how the time signature of the cathedral, centuries upon centuries already, will confuse their scanners and their tracers and they won't be found, here amongst the dead in the broken-through cathedral. He could have told her. It's like those time rats all over again, eating away at the cathedral doors, and then they eat him, too, because he's the oldest in the room.

The time rats will eat him before they eat any songbirds. He'll make sure of that.

Doubly sure.

Triply.

He buries himself in the whirring buzz of algorithms and time-ways, sonicing the manipulator into obscurity, erasing, erasing, erasing everything. Something he really should have done before, but he was having fun tearing apart time travel layer by layer, the tiny time-traveling space hopper and learning just exactly how it ticks. Now, though, he just erases, scrubs clean with bleach, demolishes, addendum, all other words strung together to create the word destroy. He mangles the manipulator, and when it's done he'll have to rebuild it from scratch, if he wants to have a quick escape route on hand.

Well, at least it'll keep him busy for the weekend, assuming they all live to see it out.

* * *

Ten hours. Ten long hours, and he still hasn't spoken a word to her. Once Henriette finishes doctoring John and Melody each, she and Casanova enclose themselves further down the mausoleum hallway, the way lovers do who are apologizing to one another. And finally, finally there's nothing left. He can't stall any longer.

Pocketing the manipulator again, now with wires poking out of it (because Time Agents are paranoid and it still took him a good four hours to crack the firewall around the neural relay), he meanders over to where Melody's sitting on the ground next to the rotting remains of a bishop. He crouches down beside her, fingers lacing together. He doesn't know what to say.

He never knows what to say.

At last a "Melody . . ." is ventured forth. She won't look at him, curls tighter and away, her injured arm tucked awkwardly in at her side. He doesn't have nanogenes, rare as they are, and even with advanced medicine it flesh takes time to heal, knit together. He used to be better at this, keeping his companions uninjured. His friends. He used to be better.

He unfolds from his crouch to sit beside her in the dirt, amongst the cobwebs, his shoulder knocking into hers. "Sorry," and that, too, falls flat towards this woman he still barely knows, here amongst the dead.

Old, old man: his hands shake as he takes off his spectacles and creaks them into his palm, folding in the ear-hooks with a snap. Weary, he rubs at his eyes, the bridge of his nose. Pressure points. There's a headache brewing behind his eyes. Nine hundred and eleven years worth of memories, not counting Donna's memories flickering in and out of his head like fish—too many for part-human brain. Too many.

Cluttered. A cluttered attic. That's what he is.

"Don't think I'm a stranger to hate," he says. An offering.

She looks at him then, rolling around to spit fiercely, "I'm not going to apologize. Not for shooting—not him. Not this Jack. Not after what he's done to you, and to Braveheart. Don't expect me to apologize, don't you dare."

John blinks at her, surprised. "I wasn't expecting you to—" because yes, he understands hate. (Which isn't right, or just, or fair, but this isn't about fairy tales such as those.)

"I wasn't expecting you to do that," he continues. "Apologize. I wasn't. But you did—you did shoot him. I don't think you—that I can trust—" He catches on the words, chokes on them.

The crucible burned.

Melody closes her eyes. "You were listening in at the door."

Now it's his turn to look away.

She look at him, lays down facts. "At the door, when Henriette arrested me. That entire time. That's how you knew that they were going to eventually kill me. And you didn't do anything to stop her, not until—"

"—you were in danger, yes. I—"

"And before then, that trick with the manipulator. Again. You did it to me again. You have to stop—I can help. I can stand next to you, and help. I can. If—If you—" and the words die in her, and she looks down at her hands, curled into fists. She uncurls them; her fingernails had dug into the skin, leaving half-bloodied crescent moons in their wake. She doesn't even feel any pain, which is so, so wrong.

He's already marked her. She won't ever be the same. And she has nowhere else to go, no family waiting for her.

John grants her the courtesy of pretending not to notice when she scrubs her eyes with the heel of her hand, pretends, pretends as she forces down the tears, thickly swallowing years of waiting.

The words are pulled from him. "I could run faster . . . without someone to worry about. I told you. Think faster, clearer." (less human) He knows that doesn't even begin to cover the problem.

Floundering, he asks instead, "If I what, Melody."

She drags her head back and forth. No.

"If I what."

The words are pulled from her, too, small, squeaked through a tight throat. "If you still . . . want. Want me. To come with you, I mean. To travel. You've—you've dropped others for less." Her voice goes all jiggly again, and she has to stop, push, push. She never used to be a crier.

Another thing changed.

He looks at her, the trees in his eyes shocked into green sunlight. "Don't you want to travel with me then?"

"Don't be daft. Of course I do. Where else would I go? Would want to go?"

"Right then. One thing settled. I'm not kicking you out." He sniffs, nods, says to the girl who was lost in time and who never really had one before, "You're my friend."

"Alright then," she whispers back. She can barely breathe from not crying. In the dead and the damp he pulls her into a hug, hands ruffling the back of her head.

She stays there for a while, pushed into the nape of his neck and the wool of his pea coat, and breathes in and out years.

* * *

When Henriette gathers them up to leave, they're laughing. Breathlessly, hopelessly, over a misadventure in John's youth, five, six hundred years ago, with Alistair and UNIT and all the rest. Melody laughs so hard she cries.

"It's time," Henriette informs them. They stand, brush of cobwebs and the dead fingers of dust. Wordlessly, John hands Melody the pistol, Casanova what remains of the tin of salt, and Henriette a pair of shoes from his coat pocket.

They go.


	27. bird on fire

**********A/N: Largely unbeta'd, and half of it written late at night as it is. I apologize in advance. You can kinda tell where I get tired when the italicized parenthetical sentences start cropping up. Also: when I go back and edit the whole of this, later, I will add in actual accurate-city-map stuff about Venice. I was simply too lazy to do any research. So them traveling through Venice is glaringly inaccurate. ~madis**

* * *

When you know how to time it right, crossing into vampire territory is laughably easy. The patrols can't cover the entire city, broken up as it is with canals and uninhabitable areas. But there are eyes, there are watchers, the still living inhabitants of Venice. They keep watch where the patrols cannot. At dusk the eyes turn inwards to the brightness of their homes, and the patrols pick up the pace for the night to come, but still, still, everyone's still turning to and away from each other.

It's the perfect time to steal an unused boat, abandoned now that most of the canals are blocked, and float down low through the water-roads until all the bridges are broken and burned to keep the vampires from crossing.

Out of all of them, Casanova knows the city best. John had described to them the general whereabouts to where they'd landed; Casanova will lead them in as close as he can. He's kneels at the helm, gaze intent, focused on the buildings surrounding them, looking for black shadows that may conceal a body. He calls out directions every so often, voice quiet so as not to carry any farther than the boat. Other than his voice and the creak and splash of the oars in the water, it's silent.

"We're here," he says.

They dock the boat and silent, silent, head out. John goes first, sonic held in front of him. He checks it periodically, hunting down the TARDIS's signal, which grows stronger or fainter by degrees.

Perhaps he could have called her to them, but the adventure is a burning star in him. Too late to back out of it now. And besides, he certainly hadn't installed a remote control in her, that's cheating.

* * *

Twenty minutes in of being wary at every shadow. John's steps become swifter, surer. Recognize, recognize. Dog on the scent.

John came this way to rescue Melody from wherever he'd sent her, following the time-signature of the manipulator out. He'd been hunted by vampires, and had leaped in a burning boat to get to the other side. Although he must have learned nothing as a soldier if he didn't know how to survive vampires. A right proper fool.

But he has others to worry about. Humans. Four hearts beating instead of just the one who can change his smell, mask it. (a small, leftover trick)

So of course they're hunted.

* * *

They slam around the corner. Teeth and saliva and ferality are right behind them, three to be exact. John gives a great shout of recognition as he dodges the rotted fruit of the fruit cart. "This way!"

Turning, turning, Henriette shoots plasma burst green, calm as butter, before cramming her and Casanova into the alley after John. There are two now, angrier than ever. Melody shoots, shoots, backing into the alley. She's hit from behind, falls. She slams into the ground rolling, pops up on one knee to crack open another vampire's head with her last shot. All seven gone, and she hadn't the time to reload before hands snag in her hair, drag her back and up.

She twists wild as a fish, slams her pistol into skin and bone. In retaliation the hands turn her into the nearest building, ripping open her cheek with plaster and wood. Melody's head swims. Teeth bite down into her arm, her throat. Two. Where had the second—three, another in her shoulder, fingernails tearing into clothes and skin and bone.

They're going to rip her apart with their teeth.

Time slows. She doesn't remember the Doctor's adventures being quite as violent as this. She watches their red mouths tear into her screams, fascinated. She doesn't feel the pain, not yet, and then she does and

and

one.

two.

three heartbeats she's on fire. She's on fire. She's burning teeth dripping venom, soaking into her veins as they draw out her blood.

They're replacing her.

Henriette rescues her with the tin of salt, pelting them all, drags Melody's teeth and hair and skin into the TARDIS. She shoots, reloads, shoots again, all the while dragging Melody screaming. Time Agents are built to survive anything, trained to kill. Markor was top of her class.

Melody is dropped to the glass floor, and she rolls in her blood and the venom, smearing the glass with her fire. She's on fire. On fire.

She understands why they called her—

The TARDIS jolts, lifts, shudders and dissolves out of space-time into the future-past somewhere else, and curls her asthmatic wheezing around Melody the best she can.

Henriette's hair is golden wheat as she bends over her, curling over Melody's face. She doesn't smell of roses at all. A completely different yellow altogether. The white wings of her dressing gown soak red as she applies pressure to the wounds, but there are three, she can't attend to all of them. Henriette calls for Giac, voice sharp; he hurries over, wide-eyed, follows Markor's instructions as she fumbles in her med-kit for a half-used bottle of No Pain. (the medicines simpler but more effective, that's what she said as she slathered and healed and Melody tried not to show how uncomfortable she was with future technology, she's had enough of future medicines to last a lifetime.)

This happened

happened last time, too much red, and John restarted her heart last time. Miracles like that only come around so often, she can't—

She burns, the venom making short work of her heart. Last time, she hadn't been on fire.

"Keep her stable!"

Where? His voice is very tiny and far away, traveling down the opposite end of a telescope. Henriette's hair keeps on getting in the way, she can't see past all the wheat and the blue sky for the trees.

John lifts the box with his magician's magic as he swings around the console, lifting them into the sky Atlas unshrugged. As Melody chokes on fire, the box tells her she'll be alright. _She'll be alright, _she adds, _in 789 days exactly. She'll be alright. My John and I will take care of her, and she'll take care of us. Sorry I lost the first-aid room; it would have been useful five minutes ago. Oops. _

* * *

"She'll be alright. Now that we have her on a drip cycle, the venom will leave her system in the next two hours. She'll sleep till then."

"Yes Doctor," John says with an ironic smirk. "It _would_ be doctor now, instead of Markor."

"Yes." Henriette twines her hand through Casanova's. "The eighteenth century and its quirks. How will we ever survive." She tosses Casanova a grin, which he catches and returns.

"I'll guide you."

"Yes." She winks at him. "You will."

John clears his throat, boots squelching in the mud. Paris awaited the couple two miles beyond; from what he vaguely remembered of history, this was where Casanova was supposed to end up. Henriette wasn't supposed to be with him, but small changes shouldn't twist things too much. Not this time.

(_this doctor will never, ever know the victorious. there's too much Donna for that. too much human.)_

"She loves you, you know," Casanova informs John quite cheerfully.

John's dragged out of timelines to stare at him. "Eh. What."

"Ardently. Passionately. I saw how she looked, worrying about you. She loves you."

Neither of them needs to ask who _she_ is, which is nice on so many levels and worrying, too.

Is it that obvious?

John passes his hand over his face, just the once, and the spectacles unfold themselves on his nose. A shield to hide behind. "No," he says, very slowly, dragging out his accent with a shake of the head. As if that would help any. "Nooo, she doesn't. Not like that. Not—" He flaps his hands, desperately trying to articulate the "not." "Not like that. Not _romantically_. And I'm—I'm not—I can't. No. And, ahm, do either of you speak French? Because living in Paris, you're going to have to speak French."

"She loves you," Casanova continues doggedly. "Almost as much as you love her."

"Giacomo," Henriette chides gently, taking him by the arm and giving him a little shake.

He raises his eyebrows at her. "What? I am right. And when I am right, he will owe me a chicken."

John looks up at this. Wagers are one thing he does understand. "A chicken, Giacomo?"

"A chicken, John."

"I'm not going to shake to that."

"You'll still owe me a chicken."

Henriette, casting an exasperated glance in her lover's direction, salvages the situation by saluting John goodbye, who gives her an amused flick of the fingers in return. "You know they'll keep on coming after you. All of you." She places on hand on the TARDIS exterior, the wood humming alive under her fingertips.

"I'll keep them safe."

"Keep you safe," she shoots back. "You're just as wanted as they are, Doctor Foreman."

"Noble," he corrects her. "It's Noble."

Henriette's eyebrows shot straight up at that. "Really. How interesting . . . Well then, John Noble, try not to be arrested. And stay out of hospitals—that alias won't work for you anymore. Either of you."

He realizes she's talking about the Brothers of the Infinite Schism, and Melody's hands. Ian pulling rank he probably doesn't have any more. "Ma'am." He flicks her another salute, ends up shaking Casanova's hand anyway.

"Don't forget my chicken."

"Oi, lover boy. Don't count your eggs before they hatch into wee chickies and eh." He scratches the back of his neck. "You'll like this bit."

The TARDIS fades with its sawed off scrape of piano keys screwed on backwards, exposing the Paris skyline naked in dawn's light. "Spectacular," Casanova murmurs. "Tell me, my love—are all things from the future bigger on the inside than the out?"

"No," Henriette laughs. "They're not. That machine is truly special."

_(dangerous. she really means dangerous.)_

They squelch through the mud and the grass towards the city, hand in hand.

* * *

"They didn't stay true to history after all. She was supposed to leave him. But that's alright. One good thing so far, in all this business of traveling. One good thing." He folds Signore Giacomo Casanova's biography over his knee, leans creaking back in his chair. The bright sunflower walls of Melody's room enfold them both. He makes sure to whisper, although not much would wake Melody from her anesthetized slumber.

He used to be better at this, keeping them healthy.

He used to be better.

John leans forward to kiss Melody on the forehead, which is something he certainly doesn't remember his own mother doing, but Donna's mother, oddly enough, had. He doesn't try and figure out what this says about his own mother.

_(They'd had to get used to one another again, remember. And that takes time.)_

Tolkien was out, but Melody had Lewis's _The_ _Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe_ on her bedside table, bookmarked chapter two. Not much time for reading, and at least Lewis had stuck around for this universe. "Bit of a corker, he was" John whispers to Melody. "Bit of a bright old corker."

Perhaps they could go visit him next. Melody would like him.

And then softly, so only the walls could hear him: "I wouldn't even know where to get a chicken."

Roses clot thick in his breath and eyes, and he spits them out of his mouth as he breathes in a children's tale.


	28. integration

Melody blinks. "What happened?"

Oh Melody, sweetie, we've been over this. You had a bad fall.

"Eight months in a coma," she says, slow, remembering dazed in the plastic-squeak of the psychiatric chairs.

That's right. Eight months. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Tyler. Your psychoanalysis came back; you're going to be absolutely fine. You should be released soon.

"Doctor. Why would I need to be psychoanalyzed if I was only in a coma?" she asks. "That's for people with head problems. I'm not crazy."

No, sweetie, you're not. But you dreamed. About boxes and doctors. And none of that's real.

"But it is." She hesitates, wavering. "It is."

No, they're not. The doctor smiles at her, not unkindly.

They're just dreams. You've been dreaming.

"But what—" His name dies on her lips, swallowed back in.

John wasn't just a dream. No.

* * *

"I hate you."

Melody grins at him, hatter mad. They both instinctively duck as a bullet lodges into the wall behind them.

"Hate hate hate you. Times a thousand infinity plus." He gestures wildly, raising his arm and knocking her hand into the wall. "Sorry. _Hate._"

"No you don't, you dafty. Shut up."

He splutters. "Did you just tell me to shut up?"

"Yes I did."

Another staccato of bullets causes Melody to drag him forward, careening around the building they were huddled next to and into the street beyond. John contorts wildly as he twists along behind her, desperate to not knock over any passerby.

They're halfway down the street before the tech-rustlers crash out of the corner of the previously vacated alley. Their flying motor-bikes knock civilians left and right, who scatter throwing curses and, in one pedestrian's case, a choice piece of fruit, which knocks one of the rustlers off his tracks and into a nearby bakery. He collides in a cloud of flour and broken glass.

_One down, _John thinks. _Five to go. _

Maybe things weren't as impossible as they looked.

* * *

Liz hands her a cup of tea.

How have things been going? Anymore dreams?

"Yes. We were running again. We held hands."

And how is he?

"Fine. Absolutely fine. We flew."

Melody, you know he's not real. John's inside your head.

Melody looks down at the tea in her hands. Her own reflection gazes back at her, brown from the tea and sad.

She can't really remember his face anymore.

Melody? You alright?

"Yes." Liz really is one swell gal, Melody thinks, looking at her. Helping her out like this, even a year after Melody's been released from the hospital.

A real friend.

"I'm fine."

* * *

They stumble to a stop on the cliff face. Stones clatter down into the gorge behind them. Nowhere to run to except through the rustlers before them or down the cliff behind, and neither seems like an excellent option in the best of times, let alone handcuffed.

"John." Melody's eyes search his. "Do you trust me?" It's a bit of an odd time to be asking, what with the tech-rustlers taking shots at their feet to try and push them into the gorge; his thoughts swirl, stop lightly on the only answer he can give.

"Don't be stupid. Of course I—"

"Good." In one decisive twist Melody turns sharp off the cliff space into gravity and air. There's a moment's slack, as the handcuffs give way between them, and John and Jim-Bob the tech-rustler blink at one another in shock, Jim-Bob with his gun still pointed to shoot at John's feet. Then the handcuffs bite down and drag him over the cliff after her.

His world tilts sideways, then crashes upside down altogether—the red of Melody's hair tangling with the TARDIS waiting ten feet below them, parked and ready, the wind, the canyon walls. Dream blurred, all coalescing and yup. Hates. Hates her. She's insane. Absolutely. Shouldn't like that, really. Shouldn't at all.

Ach, when has he ever been one to listen to reason anyhow?

* * *

And now?

"I barely dream about him anymore. I'm fine. I have a job now."

The one you mentioned, in your hometown. Leadworth.

"Yeah. I'm moving back in with Mum and Dad. They're happy to have me back."

You love your parents very much.

"I do." A half-smile, ironic because after finishing her degree she's not a superhero after all.

"I'm going to be a geography teacher."

I'm glad you have your life back. I think we can stop these visits now. You've been fully integrated.

Melody laughs. Liz always says the strangest things.

"Oh must we? I'd miss you."

Yes, we really must.

* * *

"You just assume I'm—"

"What?" Her voice teases him, slipping down an octave. He focuses on the window, the concrete, ears hot.

"You just assume I don't . . . dance."

"What," she rolls back and forth in the wheelchair, squeaking the wheels. "You do dance?"

"Nine hundred years old, me. I've been around the block a few times. I think you can assume at some point I've _danced." _Yup. Nine hundred years old. Daft old man, her surprise wounds him just a bit, just a prick.

_"You?"_ Of course she doesn't—

Of course she doesn't.

Rose and the Doctor dance, and Melody doesn't remember after all.

* * *

The floor rises up to meet her, and she rolls a bit, her covers falling on top of her in a cloud of yellow stripes.

Carl Brixx's voice drowns out the red chase of dreams, and all that's left is the drawl of his voice as he half sings "Good m_ooooo_rining," drawing out the "o" in morning to make it five syllables instead of the one. Still half-asleep, Melody claws out of her covers to slam off the weather forecast. She misses on the first try, sending her alarm-radio instead cracking down onto her head, which at least stops Carl Brixx from expounding upon "nine degrees Celsius with a high chance of rain out." She spends the next minute sitting on the floor tangled in her sheets, straight cursing at the general grumpiness of morning altogether.

Melody manages to brush her teeth and twists her hair up into a knot at the nape of her neck at the same time, throwing on clothes as she goes. Even with her alarm going off on time and forgoing the usual shower, she's down the stairs twenty minutes late. There's a not from Mum on the counter, who left for the city early this morning. Breakfast for Dad in the fridge, who will be off night shift in the next hour, and coffee for Melody, who doesn't have breakfast.

"I love breakfast," she says aloud, correcting, and sits down to tug on her wellies. It's raining outside. "I really, really love breakfast."

* * *

Work is close enough that she walks, squelching through mud and rain sluicing off her raincoat, which has a hood to keep her hair dry. She changes into her pumps once she's inside the school proper, and leaves her coat and boots inside the mudroom to dry. It's mostly empty now, but it'll be jam packed when the teachers come in. The students have their own mud room outside their classrooms.

No one's in but the janitor, who opens the school every morning and turns on the boiler to start heating the twelve classes. Melody likes being the first in every morning. There's something about the emptiness of school hallways, echoing boot squeaks and smelling of dried gum emptiness from the day before. Fascinating.

"Fantastic," she murmurs, switching on her classroom lights and drawing up the window shades. Her palms still smart from the cold, and hitting the floor. Melody bruises easily. "Fantastic."

The janitor forgot to light the boiler. She has to do it herself, and almost smokes out the entire school.

Typical.


	29. four for you

Sally Cardagh is the brightest student to ever grace Leadworth Prep. "I'm worried about her," Melody confides to her mother. "She never has any friends. All the other kids tease her, and there's only so much I can do. I'm her teacher, not her playmate. I'm not her friend."

"Sally needs to learn to grow up, make her own friends." Which is a bit of an odd thing for her mother to say, but Melody forgets that too. "Who are her parents?"

"I—I don't know." Melody puts down her tea, spoon and all. "I know everyone's parents but hers. This is Leadworth. I've grown up with everyone. I should know them."

Amy's brow wrinkles. "She's not right. We should have everyone classified in."

Melody catches this, half turns. "W-What?"

"Nothing dear. Just talking to myself." Amy smiles at her, and your brother Anthony rang today; he's going to be in town next Tuesday. And Melody doesn't want to notice the binary that makes up her mother's smile.

* * *

"I do have friends," Sally says, smiling bird-bright at her teacher crouched next to her in the dirt of the playground. Sally digs the stick into the ground, adding a second window.

"Oh really." Melody's heels stick in the mud. It'd just stopped raining, not that rain would stop any of the children from going outside anyway. "The box is your friend?" God, it was worse than she thought.

"No, the box is me." Sally adds a light on top of the box, and a smiling face in the window second window. "The janitor's my friend. You should talk to him. He's nice. He'd like you."

"The janitor is your friend?" Melody frowns, wondering if she should report this. Other than the overall impression that he was very tall she's never even _seen _the janitor, really.

"He's my parent's friend too," Sally adds artlessly. Next to the box she draws a stick figure with wild curly hair. "When they—" She stops abruptly.

"When they . . .?"

"I'm not supposed to tell you."

"Sally—" Melody takes a step, stutters to a halt. The chill of the road and the damp of the grass penetrate her supposed weather-proof raincoat. Melody shudders, drawing the raincoat tighter round herself. It'd darkened along the course of the day, but what's rain and cloud to Leadworth?

Melody and Sally walk down the road past the mailhouse, the ducks bright boats in their pond. Sally seemed well enough, but Melody still hadn't managed to shake down the janitor with an interrogation, and it'd been a week. He always was where she wasn't—or she was where he wasn't. Either way, Melody was worried for her pupil, and had invited her home when Sally's parents weren't able to pick her up. A mystery solved there, at least; they were both very genial people, having moved in from the city to give their daughter country living. Melody didn't remember them, but then again it was a recent move, and Sally's mother had her daughter's bright coin-stamp hair, so a mystery solved neat and away. Unfortunately, Melody hadn't been able to talk to them about the supposed janitor friend. They'd been seen at a distance, which was frightfully annoying, but at least she now knows that Sally wasn't lying about having parents.

"Sally," Melody begins again, looking down at the child in-step beside her.

"Duck quacks don't echo," Sally interrupts. "Quantum." The ducks quack at one another, swim toward Sally hopefully. She tosses some of the leftover sandwich seran-wrapped in Melody's pocket to the ducks, who nibble apart the bits with their sharp bills. "And we ran into Sontarans yesterday last month last year," she adds, overriding Melody's open mouth and half-began word. "Five thousand years ago, actually. Five thousand and forty-seven."

Melody sniffs. Her nose is red cold. "Sontarans," she questions, voice flat, hands wedged back firmly in her pockets.

"Yes," Sally affirms. "They tried to change history by destroying the Hindenburg, throwing Earth into chaos and war, so they could wedge themselves in during the ensuing confusion and take over. Because the Hindenburg blowing up in this universe would've drastically changed history for the worse, even more so than the Doctor's universe, because it wasn't the way things were supposed to go here."

"The Hindenburg blowing up."

"Yes, but you, the janitor, and I, we stopped it. So you were able to go on zeppelins every Christmas with Melody Williams's dad."

"And my mum. She came too. And Anthony. He threatened to pitch me out the window once." She grins at the memory. "I hit him."

"No."

Melody frowns. "I'm part of this too then? You and the janitor? Your . . . game. I helped save the Hindenburg?"

Sally tosses the ducks the rest of the crumbled bread, turns towards Melody. "Of course," she says. "You're Miss. Williams—you held the buttons down. Come on then!" She laughs at Melody toiling up the hill behind her. "We don't have much time. Just over the hill, like I told you."

Melody slips in the mud, her knees squelching down into the muck, staining her nylons. Grumbling, she hauls herself up the rest of the hill to stand next to Sally. They take shelter under a mulberry tree at the top of the tree, look down the other side. "Sally?"

"Yes?"

"There's nothing special about Farmer Tannis's sheep."

"Oh, I lied. They're not special, they're just not real." Sharp, Sally looks at Melody.

_Has she always been that tall? _Melody wonders dizzily. The red of Sally's jacket catches the air, turns brick solid as she grabs Melody by the shoulders.

"They're going to reset you in a moment," she says, serious, tall. So tall, so red, and the yellow of her hair turning to cloud wisps. "I've brought you right out of your boundary, connecting you to my John. It took me months and to bring your sub-consciences close enough without them noticing to do this. And then you had to go and notice me. Melody Williams, too good at noticing. I don't know if I'm going to get another chance again. Once they've found a way to find me their walls are very good. And I can't come back smashing in—well, I could, but that'd smash everybody."

"W-What are you—Sally, you need—" Melody takes a step away, to gather her thoughts, but the girl comes with her, invading, too close, not giving her pause to collect and re-gather, just as she's always done.

"None of this is real. You've been inside an isolation tank for the last eight months, dreaming of a world that isn't real. We were supposed to go to Space Florida, but you needed to be here. So here we came. Time-loops are the tangliest yarn of them all, and connecting all the knots together is busy work. I deserve a vacation after this. Melody Williams, none of this is real. You've both been connected now, you need to find—"

* * *

Melody manages to brush her teeth and twist her hair up into a knot at the nape of her neck at the same time, throwing on clothes as she goes. Even with her alarm going off on time and forgoing the usual shower, she's down the stairs twenty minutes late. There's a note from Mum on the counter, who left for the city early this morning. Breakfast for Dad in the fridge, who will be off night shift in the next hour, and coffee for Melody, who doesn't have breakfast.

"I love breakfast," she says aloud, correcting, and sits down to tug on her wellies. It's raining outside. "I really, really love breakfast."

* * *

Work is close enough that she walks, squelching through mud and rain sluicing off her raincoat, which has a hood to keep her hair dry. She changes into her pumps once she's inside the school proper, and leaves her coat and boots inside the mudroom to dry. It's mostly empty now, but it'll be jam packed when the teachers come in. The students have their own mud room outside their classrooms.

No one's in but the janitor, who opens the school every morning and turns on the boiler to start heating the twelve classes. Melody likes being the first in every morning. There's something about the emptiness of school hallways, echoing boot squeaks and smelling of dried gum emptiness from the day before. Fascinating.

"Fantastic," she murmurs, switching on her classroom lights and drawing up the window shades. Her palms still smart from the cold, and hitting the floor. Melody bruises easily. "_Fantastic_."

The janitor'd forgotten to light the boiler. Melody stands there a moment, hands on hips, frowning. She'd forgotten something, just niggling on the back shelf of her mind. "Hm," she says, and instead of risking it goes in search of the janitor.

He's very tall, and surprisingly recognizable, with the teeth and that wild mop of hair. She stops right in the door of his closet, and the mop handle smacks her in the face for her troubles. She simply hadn't been prepared to expect him, not this face, not the teeth. "Doctor," she says, the word opening up inside of her.

He squints at her, and tugs on his work suit. "Have we met?"

No, they'd never met.

"We're not real," she informs him.

Clever, clever Braveheart, giving the one person who'd been a part of her subconscious so long the computer wouldn't think to erase him.

"If that so," he says, and grins at her. "How thrilling."


	30. caught in the present

**A/N: **OH LOOK, A CHAPTER. SORRY FOR THE WAIT. *scuttles away* -madis-

* * *

**Previously: **

_"We're not real," she informs him._

_Clever, clever Braveheart, giving the one person who'd been a part of her subconscious so long the computer wouldn't think to erase him._

_"Is that so," the Doctor says, grinning at her. "How thrilling."_

* * *

The Doctor comes home with her, following along her heels like he's always done, ever since she was little.

She can't look at him.

She can't stop looking at him.

Her childhood hero, who she's never met. Who she still hasn't met. Because, as the Doctor oh so cheerfully explained, he's just her subconscious projecting an image out at her that she trusts. Not actually here. Not actually real. "We're all the same man, really," Three explains, passing the pork cutlets to Amy. "Even John. Deep down, right when you get to it. All of us. Different faces, mind you, which makes for some interesting self loathing, but that's neither here nor there."

"Ah. Yes," Melody says, looking at her parents, her apparently not-real, beautiful parents, wondering why they didn't see him as anything other than ordinary. Because they were all part of her? The idealized version of her parents, Amy red and smiling at her wedding, at seven with a ragged slip of a man, and her father before he kissed her goodbye at university, the last she saw of him driving away in his beat up tan car. The second, his face plastered on the TV plugged into the wall at the local cafeteria, and you looked up from the Doctor on your napkin to find that you're unexpectedly, completely alone.

Again. She's losing her father again. She can't look at either of them, eating dinner, Amy laughing at Rory about his day at work. Melody turns towards the Doctor. He looks at her, face expectant, scarf lounging across his shoulders and down onto the table, curling among the platter and the gravy boat. "Why did I dream about you?" she asks. "Why me?"

Melody blinks. She curls up among the ruins of her bed—she hadn't made it this morning-last-week, and it's uncomfortable, realizing that you have no idea if being reset affects your knowledge of time.

How many times has the computer reset her?

The Doctor sucks on his lower lip, contemplative, and it's almost easier to think of him in numbers, the way he changes inside her head. Four, Three, Six, Four again. Five, now, who looks at her out of his shock of brown eyes to say, "Brave heart, Melody. Keep your chin up. We'll get through this." His lips twitch. "Janitor. Your whip-snap of a TARDIS has the most ridiculous sense of humor."

"You're avoiding the question," Melody reminds him.

"Mm, yes, well. I'm inside your head. How in the world am I supposed to know information like that when you don't, hmm?" His cane taps the ground as he sits on the bed next to her, the mattress bowing under his weight. He looks at her beetle-bright, eyes snap black. "Silly girl. You ought to know better by now."

"I suppose." Melody closes her eyes, turns her face away from him. Over the years so many of the Doctor's dreams and memories were caught inside her head, she sometimes isn't sure which are even hers.

"I wish I didn't," she says.

"Didn't what?"

"Dream about you. I wish I didn't. Sometimes."

"My child, we all have our burdens." His hand, at her shoulder, turning her towards his crooked smile. "Otherwise how would you ever have met the janitor, eh?"

Melody offers him a small smile. Otherwise. Otherwise, otherwise, otherwise.

She could have been normal. Instead, she has burning inside her head. Gallifrey, a million million voices all crying out at once, suddenly silenced. She knows more about the Doctor than John will ever know. Knows more about John that John will ever. All of them together, all the different faces, and the same man underneath. All sharing the same burdens, the same pain.

All friends lost.

Melody sits up, dragging herself through the Doctor and her house and binary. Her parents are at the door. Amy smells of tea and soap; Rory's hand passes through her hair. She steps through them, around the garden path, because even now Dad would kill her if she stepped on his tomatoes. Her feet sink down into the mud of the hillside, black mud that catches at her heels, sucking her back down.

Melody has two friends in the entire world. She can sacrifice a bit of normalcy for one of them.

The Doctor would do nothing less.

* * *

She can't seem to stop crying. Melody swears she's cried more in the past three—no, eight, Braveheart had said eight—eight months with John than her twenty-five years before him.

But that's life for you.

"Melody," the Doctor says, dogging her steps. "Where are you going?"

"To the top of the hill," she shouts. "And over the side of it." The mud clogs her down. She slips, falls, catching her shoulder and elbow and entire outer thigh in grass and mud. She hauls herself up again, the mud nibbling at her, enticing her to stay down

down

down past the rabbits and the dreaming into the hollow kingdoms. The mud eats her shoes, her knees as she hauls herself to the mulberry tree. Melody squints against the backlit of light from the sun; there's a man standing underneath the tree's canopy. The barrier, the divide Braveheart took her to. If Melody would find John, it would be here.

The man shifts, half turns. Melody pauses, unsure, her tears drying on her cheeks. The edges of her reality dissolve behind her.

"You're waking up," the Doctor says. "You're waking up. Present, not past. You have to get his attention, dear girl, old girl. Quickly now, hmm?"

Melody pauses, unsure. The best way to get the Doctor's attention. John's attention.

(The Doctor turns to AmyandRory, and they're standing too far apart, so its Amy and Rory, space space. Worrying, that. Pond is looking at you. Comfort her. That's what you do, right?)

_Make yourself unforgettable._

The words shape in her mouth, echoing back in the caverns of her teeth and tongue. She almost swallows them, choking, but in another universe she's said them often, the arch, the curve, the bite.

"Hello Sweetie."

The curve of the S, the long O rolling out past the double L's, the T crossed between friendship and intimacy, all which caught him so long ago pressed into books in a library, a million million.

So big it didn't need a name.

He didn't need.

Sauce and set to simmer behind her smile, Melody remembers nightmare and guilt, looking at the possibility of what her face could have been, how close behind that tinted visor she'd come.

Rassilon take it, he'd thought crossly. They're archaeologists.

He hates dealing with archaeologists.

John turns, one hand raised against the sudden sharp glare of the sun. His mouth runs down an R, the silence of the I, pursing on the V. He ends on a, "Melody."

She takes his hand. Nothing happens—no cracking machinery, cracking dreams. No waking up. John continues to blink down at her and say, "Blimey. Weren't we supposed to end up at Space Florida? Those tech-rustlers, and then Space Florida. A break. Automated sand—you'd love it."

Melody squints around her, disappointed. Still nothing. "Somewhat anticlimactic."

John shrugs. "You can't have everything." He scratches the back of his head with his free hand. "Um. What was anticlimactic, exactly?"

"John . . . we've been asleep. In a computer program or machine or something—Braveheart wasn't too clear on that."

"Asleep."

"For eight months."

"So no Space Florida then?"

"No Space Florida. We've been dreaming of real life this whole time. None of this is real."

At that John beams at her. "Oh, I knew that. I mean, the dreaming part's new—but the not real isn't. New., that is. Rose told me. Although I'm a bit bummed about Space Florida—it would've been brilliant."

* * *

She doesn't know what else to do, so she constructs her house around them. It's surprisingly easy, now that she knows she's dreaming; the rubber band snap of almost waking up but not at all, a quick flex of imagination and brain muscle and John was making them tea in the kitchen, grumbling about the world having gone snap-stitch. Straight for him, cream for her, and then they sit at the kitchen table across from one another. Absurdly, Melody's reminded of omelets and that first morning together: so awkward, so mistrustful, but teasing one another as if they'd known one another for years.

Which she supposes in another universe they have.

John spreads his hands across the table. He explains about his time in the dream world—his working in the Institute, his marriage, his children. A normal life. Compared to him Melody has very little to say, although she makes him laugh when she tells him she's a geography teacher. (Her parents too private a pain to share.)

"I'm sorry," he says. His gaze finds hers for a moment, breaks away. The sorry sticks in his throat—he hasn't apologized for a long time. "I wanted to forget about my troubles. So I did, and left you stuck." He grins. "Although you kept on bugging me."

"I did?"

"Mm. Kept on popping in and being cross with me. Reminding me that something was wrong. You were quite insistent."

Melody snorts. "That's me all over."

"Yup. My insistent space hamster." He beams at her across the table, sips his tea. "Reminded me about reality, although you were a bit vague on the details. More than likely because you were in my head, me dreaming of you when you were really my subconscious. And then Rose," he closes his eyes. "Rose didn't help. It was the very fact in the end, though, that she was normal, and sane, and happy—that's what told me something was wrong. Because even when she was a shopgirl at Harrisfords, she never wanted to just sit. Always wanted to go. Just didn't know how until I gave her the opportunity."

Melody swallows down her disappointment, because Rose. It's always about Rose. Melody remembers when he was younger, older, and it's everyone else. All his other friends. But John is a product of his tenth regeneration, born out of love for a girl. John has just enough Donna in his to go shouting at the world, to live beyond her. But Rose is still there. Because the Doctor loved Rose. Loves her. His regeneration, born out of the Bad Wolf, out of love for a girl who swore to protect him from the false god.

Plunged into insanity, that false god became John. Poor, dear John.

Melody blinks. Shaking, takes a sip of her tea. She takes another sip, just to forestall the idea rooting down in her head. The china is cool under her hands. Her hands, another thing gone "How do we wake up?" she asks him, desperate to think about germinating ideas. Well, idea specific.

John shrugs, unfolds his spectacles from his coat pocket and plops them down on his nose. "Eh. Dunno. Unsure, uncertain. Obscuuuure. Ooh, has a nice ring to it, obscure. Nice crisp bit where the cure is to go. And there's no guarantee that it'll even _work. _Killing ourselves, waking up. Worked before, but that's a movie. Worked for the Ponds and myself twice over. Seems to be the general consensus. A big enough kick to make the goal. Shall you go first, or shall I? If you dreamed about River she'd do the honors to both gladly—weeell, not gladly, but she'd do it. Spare us the business ourselves, which would be nice."

Melody sets down her cup in her saucer, focuses on aligning the handle right with the proper direction. "John," she says. Her voice squeaks on the end, and she has to stop and clear it. "John. I've never told you about River."

She's never told anyone about River, hasn't even dreamed about River for ages, not since Jack was torturing her. River doesn't happen always, is too private a thing to mention.

There's a pause, as Melody looks at John, and John at her, a moment where the penny flips end over end in the air, arching in its parabolic descent.

"Wha'?" John's brow furrows. "Melody, what're you nattering about? Of course you've told me about River."

_Yes, _Melody thinks. _But never about dreaming her. And we're in a dream. Right now._

The penny drops.

"You know," the Doctor comments mildly beside her, "when I said you're waking up, I said it in the present tense."

Melody stands, upsetting her tea cup; the tea seeps over the table, staining John's coat sleeve. Doctor Elizabeth Tyler raises the sleeve for inspection, lips pursed. "Clumsy," she murmurs. With a flick of her hand the table, the chairs, the house is gone. They're back in the therapist's office that Melody remembers spending so much time in, bleaching away the dreams in place for reality. Only now does she recognize that the reality was the other way around.

Heart hammering, Melody stands behind the patient's chair. "Liz, what's going on?" she demands. Not Liz, never Liz, who helped her, who was kind to her. "Where's John?"

"Never here." The psychiatrist shuffles the papers on her desk, looks up at Melody through her glasses. "He was a computer program designed to reintegrate you into the program. We go through this once every month. You're amazingly persistent in your fantasies. We give you a scenario you'll believe in, so that when the time comes to reset you you'll struggle less. The John we gave you was fabricated out of your memories of him."

Melody stares at her. "You can't—you can't just do that to people. Reset them. You can't—"

"Well, I just did." She smiles at Melody, slow and cold. "Reset to Phase One."

Melody blinks at her. "You know," the Doctor comments idly from the second patient's chair, "you'd think the program would be more adept at resetting everything. Good old Braveheart, eh?" He winks at Melody. "I'm the failsafe."

Melody begins to laugh, loud and deliberate. The psychiatrist's smile fades.

"Did you think that would work?" Melody asks her. "Sally Cardagh. Remember her? There's a reason why she wasn't in the system." Closing her eyes, Melody concentrates. The metal is cool and slick in her grasp. "Think of her as a virus."

The psychiatrist's voice grows high and nervous. "What are you doing?"

Melody opens her eyes, twists the muzzle of the gun under her chin. "Waking up," she says, pulls the trigger.


	31. waking up

**Previously:**

_"Did you think that would work?" Melody asks her. "Sally Cardagh. Remember her? There's a reason why she wasn't in the system." Closing her eyes, Melody concentrates. The metal is cool and slick in her grasp. "Think of her as a virus."_

_The psychiatrist's voice grows high and nervous. "What are you doing?"_

_Melody opens her eyes, twists the muzzle of the gun under her chin. "Waking up," she says, pulls the trigger._

* * *

She splats out from the edge of the gun, the neural implosion knocking her consciousness sideways. Everything coalesces inwards—time, memory, space, whooshing back as she pulls the trigger, bullet in the brain pan squish.

Waking up's always like this: the drugs heavy on your tongue, knowing that as they drag you from the immersion chamber to keep your body fresh as fish, knowing that you're going to have to answer. No, no. The flowers drip from your eyes onto the table, eating your throat raw, and they smell of time. All of your lost years.

No, I don't know where the Doctor is.

Lying for someone she's never even met, because she knows where the Doctor is in a dozen different points in his timeline, but not the one the wolf needs, no, never not him. That's the lie. She doesn't know.

Melody turns, tastes River's hair.

_Hello sweetie. Last I saw you, you were being tortured. It's been awhile._

_Will I ever stop having you in my head at odd hours?_

_No. I never stopped having you in mine. _

_Mmm. _Melody isn't quite sure how she feels about that. _I've always wondered why we dream._

_The TARDIS. Mine, at any rate. We're such a close probability, you and I. Sometimes our wires cross._

Melody gets the sense that River isn't too sure how to feel about that, either. Both of them off by a mere hair, a trick of the hat. So River had her stand-over woman bathed in purple lipstick, and Melody had her father to tuck her in every night.

_But, _River continues briskly, _we are who we are. _

_And I dream._

_And you dream. And I dream to, come to that. Sometimes. _

_You do?_

_Yes. Wires crossing. Electrical currents run both ways._

River pauses, then, a fraction, a hare leaping over the fire, quick and effortless. Painless, like ripping off a band-aid.

_Melody. I have something to tell you._

_Bad news?_

_Depends on perspective._

In a dream, even waking up from one, time happens all at once. You can live a lifetime in one hour, or five minutes on a loop, and you don't question your normalcy.

Melody listens. Says thank you to River, turns in her head to catch the Doctor running from dinosaurs the first time through, and this time there's no triceratops to lie dead at his feet, only a betrayal. She wakes up entirely after that.

Suffocates.

* * *

She can't breathe, shecan't_breathe, _oh God she can-t—her brain stutters, picks up again as she twists, hits glass. The oxygen mask clamps down over her mouth, gagging

s-st-panic. stuttering panic, breathing for her, clawing out of her lungs. Her arms twist in the tubes and wires holding her, pulls back sharp. There's a snap and a whirr as the IV drip tears itself from her veins, the pain instantly deadened, unfelt. Blood swirls into the air, silky and wet. Somewhere an alarm blares red and sharp through the glass tank she's in, the noise and the light adding to the panic.

_Calm down. _His voice is biscuit brisk and more than a bit cranky. _Think! Do you want to drown? No one's coming for you. The system can't be too far advanced, though,_ _if they're still using oxygen masks and IV drips._

The voice in her head sounds like Three.

Melody forces herself to calm down, breathing in (struggle) out (struggle again) through the oxygen mask. Just enough to live by—no problem for a sleeper. Melody hangs suspended in a thick solution, opalescent, like the inside of spit. A sort of preservation-fluid. She can barely turn her head. Everywhere she's like her hands, snapped all her nerve endings closed, slowed down her biological clock. A perfect cocoon for never waking up.

Someone must come along, change out the drips, change the fluid. She has to get out of here. They might notice she's woken up, and and and

_Calm down! _The voice this time's all her own. Melody tries to swim up, tangles to a full stop in the IVs and the oxygen mask gagging air down her throat. She pauses for a moment, gagging on the oxygen pumped in through her mask, stranded by the minimal safety of breathing.

Eight months in a coma, in an isolation tank. There's a very high chance that if she forces her way up and out, the shock alone will kill her. This thought holds her, IV drips curling out from their hold on the top of the tank, the blood from her ripped veins pooling into the preservation-fluid of the tank.

Melody forces herself to focus on the ceiling of the tank, barely visible through the thick opacity of the solution. She does an experimental kick with her legs; she bobs up, the tube of the oxygen ballooning upwards into her vision. Slowly, movement hampered by not feeling, she turns her head down. The oxygen mask is attached to the bottom of the tank, clamped down through the bottom of the floor.

_There must be an oxygen tank underneath, _Melody thinks, trying to breathe. The tank's not designed for moving around in; the glass siding brushes against her shoulders, her knees, and even though she can't feel it she can see, and that's enough to send panic ricocheting through her.

_Now is not the time to discover I'm claustrophobic_, Melody informs herself sharply. _Not the time._ She breathes in, and out, so sharp, the oxygen stale with plastic. She wonders if this is what Dad tasted before he died, before he gave the last to Martha Jones and left Melody behind?

Plastic.

Red light pulses from outside the tank, a dull throb in countermand with her heart in her throat. It's a warning light. She wonders when the automated system will kick in, reminds herself to breathe.

Not the time.

She bobs up a bit more, looking up through the preservation-fluid. The tank is a lot longer than it is wide, and she's able to kick her legs freely, if but incrementally. The lid of the rank rises possibly a foot above the preservation-fluid. She's not sure if she'd be able to make it, let alone force her way out through the tank's lid. Solid iron, solid metal, and all a foot above her head.

But John, out there somewhere: he would do nothing less. Her friend, the idea germinating in her head, taking root to flower, to bud. She can't stop it now, doesn't want to. Bright flower, warming her hands even as she knows it will later burn her fingers.

John. He would try for her.

He was no stranger to death.

Just as she prepares herself to violently twist up and force her way out, bare hands and all, a low buzz settles in the back of her teeth, drilling up into her skin. Instinct, Melody tries to get away from the sound, jerking up and back, running into the side of the tank, but the entire preservation-fluid she's in vibrates with the sound. The vibrations ripple across her skin, and it's the first sensation she's had in the last eight months. Her skin aches, blooming bruises along her muscles and bones, purple-yellow-green-red.

Melody ignores the pain as best she can. Her eyes widen, desperately trying to see past the spit-cool murk of the preservation fluid, the thickness of the glass, past the red throb of the light outside her isolation tank, informing the system.

_Warning, warning_. We have a drifter.

Golden, nimbus luminosity: they ooze up from the floor, the glass tank, the ceiling, pouring down and in and through cells and muscle and skin. The buzzing, settling down into her ears, stamping it's bruises on her skin. She can't see past the golden spots swimming in front of her vision. They enter into her eyes, her brain; she can feel them stamping around, rearranging into the command to sleep, power down

power down

power down.

Melody opens her mouth to scream, chokes on the oxygen from her mask. Panic thuds along her pulse, trip wiring flight, but there's nowhere to fly to, she's stuck.

Power down, power down. Shut out the lights, shut out her skull, her brain, blinking and her heart commanded to slow, slow. She tries to fight it, twisting back, but there's nowhere to go. She's not in control of her own body.

The palace drone, lulling down through the automated system into her spine, finally here.

She waited too long.

(power down, power down, in tempo with the pulse of her body.)

_Who would want such a thing?_ She twists, jerks, but her muscles are stilled by the light, controlled, slowed.

Horror claws at the back of her throat. _Never waking up. Who would want—_

Melody's eyelids droop. She tastes oranges in the back of her throat. Dad has an orange tree in the backyard, right behind the kitchen window. After Mum died, he'd let it go to rot, but she remembers eating from it just this afternoon when she came home from work.

Powering down, the buzzing kills her, it really does.

It rises to a shriek, one she almost recognizes, scatters the light left, right, center. The glass of her isolation tank shatters out, breaking open the cocoon, the preservation-fluid draining out in one burst through the glass to seep onto the floor. Melody drains out with it, catches on the straps of her oxygen mask, dangles in place moth open naked. She hangs there like a fish, suddenly caught by gravity, muscles seizing up, flopping wet and slick from the sudden bombardment of sensation. From the ripped skin on the inside of her elbows blood pools down her arms into her hands, drips from her fingers.

Sound. Taste the air taste your skin. Eyes dripping, heart hotter than melted butter, hotter than the sun, roaring along in golden silence, ready to eat her veins into fire. Eight months of nothing, and now too much.

Too much.

Her brain seizes up, stutters. The straps dig into her skin, flashes of light seizing seizing seizing fire at her arms, at her throat as she screams, chokes on her own spit, forgets how to breathe as her brain melts.

Shock. It's called shock. Sh-sh-o

ck into seizure.

She's dying. Stop all the Melodies together, and then there would be none at all.

A vise grabs her waist, her ribs, cracking them open. Bruises bloom as the straps are unhooked from her skull and ripped off her ears, as the cuts from stray bits of glass bubble and twist under the surface of her skin, turning her inside out with acid. Flay her bones, burn up the sun.

Her eyes rolls back in her head, shudders and jerks as she's lowered to the floor, her legs knocking against glass and metal as her brain shudders her body apart.

His shadow bends over her, heavy. Brain knocking around the inside of her head, she's seizing up, stiffening into red-blue-green fireworks bouncing around inside her head.

He'll have to be quick.

He clamps her down with his body as best he can, bursts the sonic _buzz buzz _into the air. "C'mon, c'mon, work, damn you, _work_."

Too much. Eight months too long.

She can't stop the fireworks.

_Buzz buzz, bzzzzrt _as he finally lets out the sonic in a steady stream of curses, rewiring their objective. Automated system, keep the subject alive.

They stream in, gold from her eyes, his hands. Fix, fix. This is cake. They grew an entire leg, once, in another universe, completely from nothing.

They work quickly, analyzing his DNA code with hers, finding the matches, slotting in place with human, human, familial, copying the pool from what they know of their own planet and species to that of human biology and anatomy and grey matter of the brain. Smooth down the wrinkles, dampen the fireworks, reroute her biological code. There's enough of his DNA to go back and reconstruct the parent's.

Absolute cake.

* * *

Seconds. That's all. Twenty at most. He's still cursing when Melody returns to herself, a steady stream thick as any sailor's.

_Buzz buzz bzzzrt._

Her vision swims, and she lies there for a moment, blinking against the backdrop of his face. She'd almost died. She takes a moment, allows herself to fall, to unravel a bit under the knowledge, sniffs wetly and drags her hand across her eyes. Then she locks it up tight in a drawer, because there's still work to be done. Lot's and lot's of running.

Keep a stiff upper lip, don't show the damage to anyone. You can fall apart in the privacy of your room.

In that, she and River are exactly alike.

Melody sits up slowly, scraping along broken glass, the metal cool and slick underneath. The buzzing stopped, replaced by hands hovering around her shoulders, ready to catch should she collapse.

"Ian," she chides. "Didn't your mother ever tell you not to swear?"

Ian has the grace to look chided. "She might've mentioned it once or twice." He's kneeling next to her, the vestiges of the preservation-fluid staining the knees of his jeans a dark black. He'd changed since she last saw him. The suit was gone, replaced by dark grey jeans and a beat-up anorak, faded to a pale rasp-red. Woodstock peeks out just above the V of the zipper, black eyes crinkled in a smile. The rest of the yellow bird is revealed as Ian takes off his anorak to drape it around her shoulders. Melody's wearing a thin hospital gown, translucent from the preservation fluid and not much else. She clutches the anorak to her gratefully.

"What happened?" Melody asks, frowning. Everything's grown hazy in her head, the dream fuzzing out as dreams often do. But she remembers Sally Cardagh, and River. What River said, too frightening to be real, too sad. The seeds germinating in the back of her throat, threatening to push out flowers and choke her to death as she says, "We were going to Space Florida. John and I. And then eight months sleeping, and then . . ." She gestures around her.

Hundreds of isolation tanks, thousands, rose up around them, stacked one on top of one on top of, with catwalks crossing each other to reach the upper levels. The red warning light still blares, casting everything wet and red, like a mouth. Everything was death silent, not even the hum and pitch of machinery to break sleep. People were in the isolation tanks, murky black blobs beneath the thick glass and the preservation fluid. They tower, and next to them Melody's isolation tank seems small and broken, glass shattered down the corridor.

Ian's not looking at her. It connects, finally, that he's really, actually _here. _"Ian," Melody asks, searching the turned lift of his face as he looks at his shoes. "Why are you here?" Saving her, becoming the god out of the machine. Not a role she ever would have pegged him for.

Ian snorts. "I have impeccable timing." His slick-white grin returns as he adds, "For once."

"Oh." He picks her up to carry her over the broken glass, sets her down on her feet once the way is clear. It crosses Melody's mind that she should protest him taking such a liberty, but she trusts Ian. She made the decision to trust him eight and some odd months ago when she'd looked at him, cuffed unconscious to the railing in the console room, and swore to Braveheart that yes. Ian Noble would be safe as houses.

She'd turn the whole world over for that.

The floor is wet under her feet, the puddle of preservation fluid numbing the soles of her feet. Melody shifts, uncomfortable. Her skin crawls with memory, and she has to take a deep breath before she's able to turn to Ian with any sense of normalcy.

Who knows when she'll feel comfortable sleeping again, not that she had an easy enough time of it before. Insomnia trembles on the edge of her awareness, but she shoves down into the drawer with almost-dying and the flowers, which spiral out of control. The drawer's getting overstuffed, and she smiles at Ian to forestall curling up on the floor and never getting up again.

"Alright?" Ian asks her, hands in pockets. His gaze sees, perhaps, too much.

Physically she feels fine. Better than fine, even. Any cuts, bruises, or atrophy sustained from the preservation fluid and subsequent shattering of the isolation tank is gone. Physically, Melody's better than she's ever been.

"Fine," she says, turns over in her mind the why that she isn't dead. "What were those?" she continues, hugging Ian's anorak tighter round her shoulders. It smells like damp cotton, almost medicinal from the preservation fluid. "Those lights. They tried to make me go to sleep, and then the tank shattered, and you were there."

Out of his back pocket Ian flips a sonic, catches it one-handed. "Nicked it, didn't I? Last time I was in. Don't tell."

"Nicked it."

"Yup. Then I hopped over to here, several hours too early. Which was a good thing, because it gave me time to scout the area, take out the skeleton crew on the upper floor who man the machinery, reroute the computer system to sift through a whole planet-ship of people. Found you just as you started waking up."

"And John? The TARDIS?"

"No clue I'm afraid." He shrugs, easy smooth. "Was too busy keeping you from death."

A spike of fear runs through Melody, thick and hot. The TARDIS would be fine, she knew that, no one could get in unless they had a key. At the most Braveheart would have been terribly bored, with no one to talk to, although she did keep herself busy by dismantling the firewall and connecting Melody's and John's subconscious together.

"But John. What if he woke up at the same time as me? Braveheart connected us, our subconscious, and I don't know how that panned out, what happened. What was the scenario and what was the Doctor. But if he woke up at the same time as me—" Melody remembers the terror, the drowning, and while John is a nine hundred and ten, she doesn't, she can't

Ian must have seen the panic on her face, because he hastens to reassure her. "The nanogenes would have sent him to sleep again. At the worst he's still awake, waiting for us to rescue him. And we know he's not dead, so there's that."

Melody looks at him. We know he's not dead because otherwise you'd cease to exist. Ian returns her gaze, level and direct, eyebrow raised.

Melody hesitates, senses a balance, finely strung. She has a feeling that if she asked, right now, Ian would tell her. Maybe not everything, but what she already knows.

She doesn't want him to tell her.

"Nanogenes?" she asks instead, and Ian lets out a barely perceptible puff of air.

"Yup," he says, drawing out the vowel and popping the P between his teeth. "The automated system of this place. Nasty buggers, unless they do what you want them to. The ultimate cure-all. Might even fix your hands, come to that."

Melody looks down at her hands clutching the anorak to her shoulders. They're dead-numbed to the world, same as ever. "They don't feel any different."

Ian shrugs. "That would be the skin graft. But that can be figured out later. Right now—"

"We need to find John. Of course."

Of course.

If Melody had thought about it, she'd have asked just how, exactly, the nanogenes were able to heal her when they were clearly on an alien planet, with alien DNA and not a human speck among the lot. The floating blobs she passed in the isolation tanks were vaguely reptilian in appearance. No, not human.

But she's too tired to think straight, let alone logically. Too muddled. She concentrates on walking straight. Images swirl around her, blink and then they're gone. The watching sirens wail flashing red, we have a drifter drifter drifter. Ian's face far above hers, constantly turning to make sure she's beside him. His hand, large and warm between her shoulder blades. How cold her feet are.

She swallows, wet and hot, blinks past the nanogenes which cloud her vision like fireflies. Ian explained that this entire cell block's purgative had changed when he'd rerouted their system from sleepy caretakers to medicinal doctors. The system would replace the missing operatives in time, and the ones following them now would continue to do so. "Because of your hands," he added. "They still sense something wrong with them, and based from the patterned template of my DNA, they'll keep on trying to fix them. Although the skin graft won't actually register—it's part of you now, as much as your kidney is. But nerve endings are fragile things, and yours were fried."

"Right," Melody says, recognizing what he's hedging around: his DNA was just human enough to work. Just enough of Rose in him to heal Melody right up, and while some part of her, the part of her that dreams and watches and has rather too much River in it for Melody's liking, recognizes the fact that this is not how nanogenes typically work, Melody's too tired to puzzle it out. Too sad.

Because Melody understands now, understands everything. The flowers crammed in the back of her throat. River's announcement. It all depends on perspective, right? Ian, with his easy grin and his father's face. His mother's brown eyes. He's been so kind to her, always, always, she who would cause him nothing but grief and, if she had her way, nonexistence.

Safe as houses_, _right? Melody's going to end up the only one unhappy.


End file.
